The Homecoming

by Carsten Stroud

  Apparently the divers could hear him.

  “Bones don’t last in water,” they heard Tuamotu say over his microphone. “At least not in warm water like this.”

  “I guess he’d know,” said Farrier with a smile. “Mike’s plucked a lot of bones out of deep water.”

  “Yeah,” said Tuamotu. “Not all of them stripped clean like these things either. If they’re bone, something’s picked all the meat off them.”

  “Got pike in this river,” said Tig.

  “That’d work,” said Tuamotu. “Okay, there’s the car, boss.”

  On the screen they saw a small pale blue blot begin to materialize out of the murky water. As Tuamotu moved closer it took on shape and form and clarity. It was Alice Bayer’s blue Toyota, almost vertical, nose down. Nick, watching the image sharpen, realized that he wasn’t breathing.

  Lemon moved farther away and stood looking across the river towards Crater Sink, where the crows were soaring high in a blue sky.

  Let it be empty, he was thinking, and although he knew he was praying, he wasn’t sure to whom.

  Or what.

  Nick and Tig watched as Tuamotu reached the side of the car. It was tangled up in a massive snare of tree roots, coated in river silt, with only a tint of blue showing.

  Tuamotu reached out and wiped a gloved hand across the driver’s-side window. The interior was dark. Call came up and put a light on the window.

  Through the speaker they heard heavy breathing and the rushing scatter of bubbles rising up.

  “It’s empty,” said Tuamotu.

  “What about the trunk?” asked Call.

  “It’s a freaking Toyota, Evan,” said Tuamotu. “It doesn’t have a trunk. It has a back pocket. You can’t even get a set of golf clubs back there.”

  A ripple of relief ran through everyone on the surface.

  Lemon felt his shoulders loosen.

  Farrier waved to the crane driver. He hit a lever and the hook began to drop down on the end of a corded steel cable. Evan Call came to the surface, caught the hook, and guided it back down.

  “Weeds,” they heard him say. “Like trying to run through a thicket of thorns. Catches at you.”

  Through Tuamotu’s camera they watched as Call came back down the root wall, struggling with the weight of the hook, which tended to force him back into the matted growth that lined the bank. He was breathing rapidly. They could hear it through the speakers.

  “Evan,” said Farrier. “Slow down. You’re starting to hyperventilate.”

  “Hate these roots,” he said, mostly to himself.

  A few seconds later he was at the tail of the car. Tuamotu moved up to brace him as he reached under the chassis to find a solid place to set the hook. They heard him muttering to himself, and his raspy breathing as he struggled with the cable. Tuamotu was holding Call’s belt and keeping the roots clear of Call’s tank frame. It took a while before they heard a solid muffled clank.

  “That’s got it,” said Call. “Mike, get me out of here.”

  Tuamotu pulled at Call’s equipment belt until the diver was able to untangle himself from the roots that were wrapped around the rear of the car.

  “Take us back ten feet,” said Tuamotu.

  The topside attendants went back to the safety lines and began to reel the lines in.

  “Good enough,” said Tuamotu. “We’re clear. You can take it up.”

  Farrier waved to the crane driver, who shoved the lift lever forward. The diesel began to grind and the steel cable pulled taut with an audible twang, droplets of water flying off as it took the weight. The engine seemed to be struggling.

  “Liable to pull the car apart,” said the crane man. Farrier made a circling motion with her hand.

  Wind it up.

  The operator shrugged, increased the power.

  The crane boom dipped and a groaning creak came from the stabilizer pads. Everybody moved back from that shivering cable. Another groan, and the diesel engine grinding low.

  Then a burst of muddy water as the roots let go, and the crane settled back as the cable began to come back in.

  “It’s going up,” said Tuamotu.

  In a moment the tail of the Toyota broke the surface and then it was hanging clear, a muddy blue ball with water pouring out from every crevice.

  The crane man lifted it up about fifty feet and slowly swung the crane around until he could lower the car down onto a patch of cleared ground. He worked it so that when the front wheels came down, he pulled the crane arm back to allow the car to settle down on all four wheels.

  As soon as the slack came back on the cable line, Nick leaned down and jerked the hook clear. Then he came around to the driver’s side, gave Tig a look. Tig nodded, saying nothing.

  Nick popped the driver’s-side door, stepping back as dirty water cascaded out from the interior, carrying with it the detritus of a life, a purse, sodden, open, spilling its contents on the ground, what had been a box of tissues, a wad of paper that might have been a three-ring binder, a Starbucks coffee cup, a pulpy mass that had once been a pack of Kools. Nick waited until the torrent became a trickle and then he leaned into the car, looked around, extracted himself, being careful not to touch anything.

  “She’s not in here,” he said, thinking that although this was a relief, it didn’t solve anything. Alice Bayer was still missing. He looked at the shift lever. It was in DRIVE. His heart got stony as he considered what that meant. Farrier came up to Tig and Nick.

  “Tuamotu’s on the horn,” she said quietly, with an edge. Everyone caught her tone and they looked at her, waiting for it.

  “She wasn’t in the car. She was under it.”

  They listened while Tuamotu and Call worked it out. The body was female, that much was clear, and partially clothed. Probably an elderly woman, for reasons neither diver wanted to make plain.

  She was bound up, literally, in a cocoon of twisted willow roots. From the body’s position—they were all looking at it on the screen now—the subject had been trying to climb back up out of the river—they guessed she had fallen in—and gotten herself tangled up in the roots.

  She drowned there, and stayed there even when the car came down on top of her. Or maybe she was going to get out okay and then the car came down on her. If that was the way it happened, nobody had to say the word murder but it was hanging in the air anyway. If she wasn’t at the wheel of that car, then somebody else was.

  The divers—and the people watching, Nick and Tig and Farrier and Lemon—all agreed that the weight of the car coming down was what had pressed her body deeper into the root mass.

  “Can you get her out of there?” Farrier wanted to know. There was a silence.

  It went on.

  Farrier was about to ask again when Tuamotu came back on the radio.

  “Boss, these roots … they’re moving.”

  Farrier frowned.

  “Sure they are. Current’s running at seven knots and there’s a whirlpool at your back.”

  Call came on.

  “Not the current, boss. Mike’s right. They move. It’s like they’re curling around that woman’s body. You can see them tightening.”

  Farrier gave Tig and Nick a look, went back to the radio.

  “Evan, get a grip. Put your light on it.”

  Call did. The cone of white light burned through the murk and into the root mass. Nick found himself looking into Alice Bayer’s distended face, her swollen eyes open, two opaque green marbles. Her mouth was stretched in what looked like agony and her dentures had come loose, a comical obscenity. Roots were wound around her and her arms were stretched out and up, her hands ending in fingers that were raw and torn at the tips, the palms shredded as if she had been fighting out of a trap. It was easy to imagine what her final moments had been like.

  Nick studied that image, letting it burn into him, because he’d need it to keep him centered on what was important here.

  It was likely that someone had done this to her, a
nd whoever it was, Nick was going to find him and put him in a cell.

  Whoever it was.

  “What’s that behind her?” Tig asked.

  Call moved the light in closer. A small rounded object was a few feet deeper into the root mass. It looked like a cage made of twigs. Or bone. There was something round inside it.

  An egg, Nick thought. An egg in a basket.

  “One of those bone basket things.”

  Farrier was losing patience.

  “Evan, you and Mike go in there and get that poor lady out of there or I’ll suit up and do it myself. And there will be consequences. Am I clear?”

  A silence.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Then do it.”

  They did.

  It took another half hour, but Call and Tuamotu managed to untangle Alice Bayer’s body from the root mass and bring her up to the surface, where she lay in the current, her long gray hair streaming, her flesh waxy and soft. She had swollen up so severely that a silver necklace was buried in her neck and the watch she had been wearing, something quirky by Fossil, had cut a trench into her wrist. It was a day/date watch, stopped of course, but maybe useful for setting a time of death. Nick made a note of it and bagged her hands.

  By that time Tig had called the medical examiner’s van in and the morgue attendants had managed to get all of her into a body bag and close the double doors.

  “There any eels in this river?” one of them asked Tig, in a low voice meant only for him.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  The man shrugged, lifted his palms.

  “She’ll have live ones inside her.”

  The other attendant, an older man with a sallow, waxy face and bloodhound eyes, simply nodded, looking apologetic and pained.

  “Happens. If a body’s in the water long enough. They go down the throat. Or up the—”

  “Thanks,” said Tig, cutting him short. “That really made my day.”

  “Hey. Weird things happen, Lieutenant,” said the younger man. “Yesterday, somebody stole two cadavers out of a refrigerated truck. What the heck are you gonna do with two frozen stiffs?”

  Tig was about to turn away.

  He stopped.

  So did Nick.

  “A refrigerated truck?” he asked. “Where?”

  The man grinned at his partner.

  “Out of the State Police lock yard near Gracie.”

  The bloodhound man spoke up.

  “It was those two guys, got killed in that police pursuit the other day. The brothers. Shugrue? Shogun? Wanted by the Feds. Got killed in the crash where all those bystanders got hurt? At the Super Gee?”

  “You mean the Shagreen brothers?” said Tig, glancing at Nick.

  “That’s it. Knew it was something like that. Everybody was talking about it at the ME’s office. Nobody knows how long they been gone, but they’re gone, that’s for sure. They figure the guys were in this White Power cult and the cult came and took them, maybe gonna have a weird cult ceremony over them.”

  “And they’re gone?” said Nick. “Both bodies?”

  “Gone as gone can be, Detective. Staties are all in a tizzy. They seek them here. They seek them there. Those Staties seek them everywhere. Anyway, there you go. Weirdness lives.”

  Tig looked at Nick.

  “I’ll call Marty Coors,” he said. “Ask him why he didn’t give us a heads-up. Maybe you better let Reed know. Could be biker guys in town thinking about payback.”

  “I will. What do you make of it? You really thinking bikers?”

  Tig looked out across the river. The sun was glittering on its surface. How could something so pretty hide so much that was so ugly?

  “Nah. Even the Nightriders wanted these guys out of the gang. I’m with these guys,” said Tig after a moment. “Weirdness lives.”

  “That’s my take on it,” said the bloodhound man. His partner laughed, they shrugged again, and were about to get in the van and pull away when Nick asked them to hold on.

  “Tig, wait one. I gotta do something.”

  Tig nodded, and Nick went back to the river, where Mike Tuamotu and Evan Call were just getting ready to come out of the water. Lemon was kneeling by the bank, talking to the divers as Nick came up.

  He stood up and looked at Nick.

  “I know. I’ve already asked them,” he said.

  “Yeah. And we sure as hell don’t want to,” said Tuamotu, with a sullen edge.

  “But we will,” said Evan Call.

  Forty-five minutes later they had seven of the “bone baskets” lined up on the riverbank. They had washed off as much of the river silt as was possible. Up here in the light of day the objects looked even stranger than they had down in the root mass.

  Nick and Lemon were squatting and studying them, but not touching them. Tig was standing over them, looking like a man who would like to be in another kind of story. One with palm trees and naked dancing girls and drinks with tiny umbrellas.

  Farrier and the divers were squaring away their gear and talking quietly among themselves. The morgue attendants were smoking cigarettes and telling each other horror stories about various floaters they had known and loved. The crane guy was gone and Alice Bayer’s car was sitting on a flatbed trailer, leaking muddy water and smelling like a dead skunk.

  “What the hell are they?” Tig asked, for the ninth time.

  “What do they look like?” asked Lemon, for the eighth time.

  Tig shook his head, considering the larger one at the left end of the row. It was about a yard long and a foot wide, and it looked like an oblong cage made of calcified stone that had been colored a deep amber by the river mud.

  The bars of the cage looked like stone ribs, in that they tapered as they rose up, and where they touched at the top, they looked like steepled hands, with the spiky fingertips making the roof of the church. Inside the cage there was a floor of cylinder-shaped stones, linked in a row that ran the length of the cage. And resting on the chain of linked cylinders was a small round object, about the size of a five-pin bowling ball, uneven, muddy brown, with markings on the surface that looked like the canals of Mars.

  Tig grunted, said nothing.

  “Come on, Lieutenant. What does it look like?” Lemon asked again.

  “Okay. I’ll say it,” said Tig, in a raspy tone, clearly unwilling to have this conversation. “It looks like a skeleton. With the skull down inside the rib cage. Happy?”

  Lemon reached out and touched the side of the basket, pushed it gently.

  “Maybe these ribs are hollow. To come down the river and get caught up in these roots, these things would have to be light enough to get carried by the current. But it feels like stone. Like it’s not organic.”

  “What’s that?” asked Nick, pointing to something embedded in the base of one of the cage bars—face it—the ribs—of the basket.

  He touched his fingertip to a vaguely greenish bump. He rubbed his fingertip across the bump and there was a sudden flash of dark green.

  Lemon leaned in to look at it, and then he pulled out a long, slender knife, black, with a ribbed steel handle, a small oval hilt, and a tapering double-edged blade that came to a needle tip. The blade was black except along both edges, where the sharpened steel glittered in the sunlight. Tig jumped a bit, but Nick, who had seen where it had come from, was less surprised.

  “A Fairbairn-Sykes?” he said.

  Lemon grinned at that.

  “Yes. Won it from an SAS guy in Iraq.”

  “How?”

  “He was sure I was an Apache.”

  “You’re not?” said Nick, but Lemon ignored him. He leaned in and used the tip of the knife to pry the green object from the stone. It came free with a dry pop and tumbled into Lemon’s palm. It was shaped like a beetle, oval, and it had crude markings scratched into its surface. Lemon rubbed it and the shine came up stronger.

  He handed it to Nick, who hefted it in his hand. It was heavier than it looked. He handed it up to Tig, who
turned it in the light.

  “Looks like a piece of jewelry.”

  “It is, in a way,” said Lemon. “It’s a trade stone. Made of malachite. You see hundreds of them up and down this coast. Mostly in museums. They were in use long before you guys came and screwed everything up. They were like a coin. All the tribes agreed on their value, based on the weight and the color. Mayaimi used them. Cherokee. Choctaw. Seminole. You’ll find them in collections and museums as far west as Santa Fe, north as far as the Dakotas.”

  “So it’s part of somebody’s collection?” said Tig. Lemon looked down at the bone cage.

  “Or maybe he’s a lot older than we think and it was something he carried in his medicine bag.”

  “His,” said Tig, his voice going higher. “You think this thing here is … human remains?”

  “I’m beginning to think I do,” said Lemon.

  “But you said it yourself. It’s made of stone.”

  “It is now,” said Lemon. “I don’t think it started out that way. It’s like it went through fire or something. It got … changed.”

  Tig literally snorted.

  “Hello? Lemon Featherlight? Come back. Earth needs you.”

  Lemon stood up.

  “You ever see a mouse after an owl has eaten it? That tiny ball of bone and fur the owl sicks up?”

  “Yeah. Sure. All over the place. Little egg-shaped packets of skin and bone. So what?”

  Tig stopped, did a take.

  “No, wait—that’s what you two think these things are? Bodies that have been … eaten? By what? No. Never mind. They’re stone, Lemon. Not bone.”

  Nick stood up, brushing the dirt off his hands.

  “Tig, we might have to find a way to get all the bone baskets we can find the hell out of that root mass.”

  “For why?” asked Tig. “There must be hundreds of them.”

  “I’d say thousands,” said Lemon. “Maybe more.”

  “Okay. Thousands of whatever the hell they are. Why do we have to dam up the Tulip to get them?”

  “Because this might be a crime scene,” said Nick. Lemon nodded.

  “Or at least a graveyard,” he said.

  Tig went silent, thinking it through.