Catacomb

by Madeleine Roux

  “Listen, Dan. I’m gonna say some things right now that you’re not gonna like. I just need you to listen and then hate me afterward, all right?”

  Dan shook under the blankets. He didn’t want to listen. He had to, but he didn’t want to. There was no processing what he was looking at on his hand, and Oliver’s words at least distracted him from the fact that he would really have to confront it eventually.

  “Here’s the box you wanted,” Oliver said, moving to sit on a rickety wooden chair next to the bed. “But it’s not entirely what I said it was.”

  Oliver cleared his throat and swung into a more upright sitting position. At his feet, a cardboard storage box waited, tattered, stained, and empty.

  When Oliver tried to offer him a mug of tea from the side table, Dan refused to take it. He didn’t want anything from Oliver now. He had wanted the box, sure, but now it was clear that the box had been some kind of trick.

  “There’s nothing in it,” Dan said, dragging his eyes from the box to Oliver. “Is this a joke?”

  “There was a box, Dan, but you need to let me explain.”

  “Do I?” He laughed, dry and sarcastic, and rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “I guess I do, since I’m not sure my legs even work at this point. They’re still there though, right?”

  “He just took the finger.”

  “Why? Why only that?”

  Oliver stared back evenly, moistening his lips before saying, “Because that’s all he needs. It depends. . . . Sometimes we take a lot more than a finger, but there’s always a reason. We don’t usually know the reason, but Finnoway does.”

  “We?”

  “Yes, we, Dan. That’s part of what I’m trying to tell you. I got chumped into working for the Bone Artists, just like I said. But I never stopped working for them, not really. The story I told you . . . There were a few inventions in there.”

  Dan pulled his knees up toward his chest, using his left arm to try to help them along. He’d have to get used to avoiding his right hand for a while. Just looking at it now made his stomach somersault, and as the feeling in his limbs started to come back, the pain was already immense. “I’m too sedated at the moment to smack you, so please, keep taking advantage of that.”

  “No smacking necessary,” Oliver said, putting up his hands in surrender. “You can’t make me feel worse than I already do. Not that it’s much help to you now.”

  “Jordan told me not to trust you. Man, he had your number from day one.”

  “You still don’t understand. This isn’t about me. Or not just me. This started with our families. My granddad, your parents. They were all wanted for messing with the Bone Artists, and the Bone Artists never let a grudge go unless the debt is repaid. I tried to get out of the debt by doing the petty work with Micah, and when they wanted me to start stealing bones, I really did try to quit. But Finnoway wouldn’t let me.”

  Dan remained silent, hoping that if he just waited long enough, the nightmare would end, and he’d be back at Uncle Steve’s in a warm, safe bed with a plate of beignets and all ten of his fingers.

  “What debt did you owe, exactly?”

  Oliver nodded to one of the photos hanging behind Dan. “You see that statue? It’s in a park not six blocks from here. It’s my grandfather, Edmund Berkley. He was a shopkeep, then a lawyer, then one of the fairest damn judges you ever seen. This town loved him, and they loved him even more when he finally cleaned up Jimmy Orsini and his smuggling, thieving, low-life friends.”

  The name drew Dan further out of his grogginess. He sat up straighter.

  “My grandfather was on the right side of the law on that fight. Jimmy didn’t live out his last days in jail like he was supposed to. He died after being rescued and gunned down, and that was just fine by most of the law-abiding folks around here.”

  “I’ve heard that story,” Dan said, and Oliver’s eyebrows shot up. “Abby’s been researching Orsini for part of her photo project. We even found an old article about him in Shreveport that had that creepy Bone Artist poem on it.”

  Oliver sighed and scratched his chin, pointing to the picture with the statue of his grandfather again. “I don’t know if he ever suspected just how deep the well ran with Jimmy. Jimmy was an old man by the time my grandfather put him away, but he was one of the originals. Hell, he might have been the Prince of the Body Thieves in the damn poem. Point is, he wasn’t just running gin and drugs, he was dealing in human bones, too. Thought they were magic.”

  Dan nodded slowly. “That’s what Madame A told Jordan. I suspect you know more about them than she does.”

  “Way more. More than I’d like.”

  “So what, your granddad got Orsini put in jail, so the rest of the Bone Artists came after him?” Dan said. “What the hell does that have to do with my parents?”

  “The Bone Artists are like the mob, a family business. They ran booze and drugs down here before, and they’ll run it down here forever. It ain’t just a bunch of gangsters anymore, they’re organized, and like I said, they hold a grudge.” Oliver reached under his chair, pulling out a half-empty bottle of rum. He swigged from it, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “They’re gonna finish wiping out my whole family for what my grandfather did, and now they’re gonna wipe out all of yours for what your mother did.”

  “What my . . .” Dan lapsed into silence. Of course. What had Maisie Moore called Trax Corp. in her article? A modern smuggling ring? Dan’s mother had uncovered a company that had been moving untested drugs out of the South and into New England for years. Into Brookline, back when the warden was there. But she hadn’t just pissed off a corrupt corporation. She’d pissed off a powerful, secret cult.

  Dan couldn’t speak for a moment; his wires were too crossed. For a year, he’d thought his blood was poison—that the tainted Crawford legacy that had been passed down to him from the warden had doomed him for life. Now, he realized the same was true about the Ash side of the family.

  “So your dad—when Sabrina said he was killed by a drunk driver . . . ?” Dan asked, studying the boy closely.

  “I don’t know how a drunk man gets all the way across that causeway safely, then suddenly, bam, decides to veer into the next lane. But it was a hit-and-run. Hard to pin that on anyone, you hear what I’m saying? Same goes for a couple on the run that just takes a dive off a cliff in the family car.” He said this with a straight, dark look into Dan’s face.

  My parents were murdered. Even though part of him had suspected it earlier, internalizing that horrible fact was a different matter entirely. It was like accepting the fact that he had lost a finger.

  But anger soon replaced despair. “You knew all of this? And what was I, the bait?” He held up his bandaged hand, shoving it in Oliver’s face. “This happened because of you!”

  Gently shaking his head, Oliver pushed Dan’s hand away. “When I first heard from Micah that you could help me, I thought maybe you had some information I could use to pay my debt. Or at least trade up, like Micah did. I found your tent right where Micah said it would be, except I had second thoughts about dragging you into all this. Then you came into my shop that first night, and you said your name was Dan Crawford. Well, it rang a bell. I’d just seen the box in the shop storage, CRAWFORD & ASH. That night, I got curious.”

  Oliver stood and snatched up the rum bottle, turning it this way and that, studying the well-worn label peeling off the glass. “We all know what families are on the list—what debts the Bone Artists still want to collect on. Ash is one of those families. And I’m sorry, but you’d just told me Micah was dead and you didn’t have jack to help me. Once I figured out that you were the son of Evelyn Ash, and here my dad had had this box of her stuff to boot, well. You were my last hope of getting out. Now it’s over for me.”

  Dan wanted to spring out of the bed. Hit him. Kill him. He could hardly move, paralyzed by the knowledge that all this—Maisie Moore’s death, Steve being attacked, Dan’s lost finger—was because Oliver ha
d turned him in.

  “Do you realize how selfish and cruel you are?”

  Oliver stared at him with wide, haunted eyes. He looked at the floor and then at Dan’s bandaged hand. “I see that now. I thought one stranger was fair trade for my life back. But you’re not a stranger anymore.” Oliver’s eyes welled up with tears, but then he swallowed them down until his eyes looked vacant. “Anyway, even after you, Finnoway didn’t clear my debt, and he never will. I’m so damn sorry, Dan. I betrayed Micah, I betrayed my father’s trust, and I betrayed you. There’s nothing I can do except promise to try and make this right.”

  “Make it right?” Dan couldn’t catch his breath. Oliver had planned to trade him in—like a bargaining chip! And now he just wanted to apologize?

  Dan rolled onto his back, staring blankly up at the ceiling. And wouldn’t you have done the same thing last summer, if it meant getting out from under the shadow of the warden’s legacy? Even now, what if you could trade one person to escape the nightmares—Brookline, the Scarlets, and now the Bone Artists?

  He would. He knew he would. Oliver’s choice, though Dan would never agree with it, at least began to make a horrifying kind of sense. It wasn’t fair or right, but counting a stranger’s worth over his own family’s? It was an impossible situation.

  “It’s funny. Finnoway warned me about you, too.” Dan’s voice was raw, but he had to say it.

  “Probably meant it in earnest. The man’s a monster, but a monster with a code.” Oliver too sounded hoarse and exhausted. “He had no idea who or what you were until I told him. And then this morning, when you texted me about going to the funeral home. I told him exactly where you were.”

  “Well, I made it out alive. That’s something. I can work with that.”

  “There’s something else.”

  Jordan’s prophetic words leapt to mind. There always is.

  “Dare I ask?” Dan wasn’t sure how much more he could stand to have dumped in his lap. Oliver had already unloaded plenty.

  “We need to get your finger back.” A dark shadow passed over Oliver’s face. His boyish features hardened, a tendon working in his jaw. “If it doesn’t end up as a talisman, it will end up as something else. Finnoway is too smart. There’s a reason he took what he did.”

  There was no stopping Dan’s outraged guffaw. “Get it back? How do you foresee us doing that? And anyway, the damage is done. It’s not like a doctor can sew it back on at this point.”

  “Think, Dan. Think about Micah.”

  “What, you think they’re using Micah’s skeleton to send us the messages? And now they’re going to use my finger bones to, I don’t know, haunt a mitten? The talisman thing is just a legend. A spooky story for kids. Even Finnoway said so.”

  “Finnoway sold you a lie, just like I did. That’s what we do.” Oliver vented a bitter chuckle and drank from the rum bottle. “These people will get at you any way they can. They don’t just have your bones, they have a fingerprint, blood, DNA. . . . Even if all the rest of it is just legend, your flesh and blood aren’t. I’ve never seen a talisman made—I’m not that important—but they are made and they do work. I know that much.”

  Dan sighed, thinking of Professor Reyes and her obsession with Maudire’s crystal necklace. Stranger things, he mused dryly. “I guess I have to believe you, even if I really, really don’t want to.” He dropped his forehead into his left palm. “So how do I get it back?”

  “I don’t rightly know,” Oliver muttered, turning away. “But sooner is better than later.”

  “I agree. But first, I know two people who are probably very worried about me right about now.”

  “We have to go to the police with this.”

  On the plus side, Jordan was talking to him again, but Dan suspected that had a lot to do with his missing finger. Before leaving Oliver’s he had taken off the bandage and, cringing, discovered that while his stomach dropped out looking at the wound, it was sewn and cleaned, as if professionally done. With no idea what to do with it, Dan rewrapped it and took a few aspirin for the throbbing and tried not to think too hard about the loss. Jordan had taken one look at Dan’s mangled hand and lost his fire for feuding.

  Uncle Steve had fared a little better, and he was leaving the hospital as soon as someone came by to take out his IV, discharged with a mandate to rest and take his pain meds. He had gotten off light, the police told Jordan, with just a few scrapes and a bad bump on the back of his head. Dan wondered if this was due to the code Oliver had mentioned Finnoway having.

  “Go to the police with what, exactly?” Dan asked. The overhead voices of nurses paging doctors broke in and out of their conversation. Dan tossed his waiting-room candy bar onto the chair next to him and sighed. “I guarantee you Finnoway is smart enough to have gotten rid of any evidence that I was in that funeral home. Unless he marches down the street waving my finger around, I think we’re screwed.”

  He hadn’t yet dropped the bomb that he needed to get his finger back from Finnoway, partly because the words stoppered up his throat with their insanity, and partly because it would only make their situation look more hopeless.

  Abby regarded him silently from the bank of chairs directly across from him. Like all of them, she’d clearly spent the night sleeping in a hospital chair. Whatever. They only looked as crazy as they felt.

  “We might not be able to prove anything, but going to the police would slow him down, at least,” she finally said. Jordan leaned onto the chair behind her, tapping his foot. “And who knows, maybe there’s a prior conviction we don’t know about.”

  “He’s running for city council, Abby. I’m betting all of his skeletons are hidden in better places than a closet,” Dan said, shivering at the accidental choice of words.

  “Well, we can’t leave!” Jordan smacked his palms on the back of Abby’s chair, startling her. “This is my home now, Dan. There’s no way I’m going back to my parents.” Jordan realized what he was saying and lowered his voice. “And we’re not leaving here without you, either.”

  Dan knew this was meant to inspire him with confidence, but the sentiment only filled him with dread, reminding him just how trapped he was.

  “What if we can find proof that Finnoway is the one who hurt you, or that he has ties to those criminals—”

  “The Bone Artists,” Dan supplied. His hand pulsed—ached—and he shuddered.

  “Yes. What if we can prove it?” she asked

  Dan avoided her imploring eyes, picking up his candy bar and fiddling with the torn wrapper. “This has been going on for years, Abby. Generations. If we get Finnoway tossed in jail, someone else will just show up to take his place.”

  “That’s not a defeatist attitude or anything,” Jordan muttered.

  “But it’s the truth.”

  Stymied, they sat listening to the hospital pages and the nurse bantering with a drug-addled Steve in the nearby room. Oliver and Sabrina had suggested waiting, trying to bait Finnoway again, but this time together, with Dan in on it. He had no idea if he could trust them that far, or at all. That was the thing about someone lying to you—it was almost impossible to believe them ever again. Dan studied Abby and Jordan, wondering how they managed to have the friendship they did, even in spite of all the secrets and lies that had passed among them over the past twelve months. Seen in that light, maybe trusting Sabrina and Oliver made perfect sense.

  More to the point, he didn’t have the luxury of picking and choosing. He needed to move quickly.

  “All right, we can try to gather some proof,” Dan said softly, closing his eyes and squeezing them. “Where do we start?”

  It wasn’t exactly home, but after yesterday’s ordeal, Dan felt incredibly lucky to be back in his little shared guest room in Uncle Steve’s apartment. Steve was too doped up from the pain meds to notice the way Dan kept twisting away to conceal his right hand. Instead, he had camped out in the living room with the Xbox, snuggled up in a fuzzy robe and slippers. They had spent the previous
night keeping an eye on him, fetching juice or food and generally making sure he was comfortable.

  Early morning light crept across the carpet in wide squares. Abby and Jordan sat on the floor of the guest room, fresh notebooks opened to take dictation while Dan went through all the files Maisie Moore had given him. This time he didn’t leave out the connection between Trax Corp. and Brookline, and it appalled his friends every bit as much as he’d known it would. At least he could take pride in the fact that this part of the Bone Artists’ operations had already been shut down thanks to his parents’ lifework.

  But his parents had been better investigators than Dan and his friends were. The information in front of them was all so tangled up and circumstantial. He felt incredibly outnumbered, and worse, outwitted. He hated how much time this was taking, when meanwhile Finnoway was somewhere with his finger, no doubt already making plans to ruin him.

  Dan squeezed his eyes shut. You’ve gone awfully silent, Micah, when I could actually use your help. They took your body, didn’t they? What do I do? How do I get it back?

  “What if we look into Finnoway’s background? I’m convinced there’s something there,” Abby said. “We could go look on the computer in Uncle Steve’s office. Or I could just pull him up on my phone.”

  “No!” Dan dropped down from the futon, almost batting her phone out of her hands. Instead, he awkwardly wrestled it from her with his left hand. “Don’t you get it? They don’t forgive and they don’t forget. If you get caught poking around in his history it will just get worse, not better.”

  “God, I didn’t even think of that,” Jordan said, staring wide-eyed at both of them. “Not to sound incredibly selfish, but I really don’t want a target on my back, either. Or my family’s.”

  Dan stayed quiet, not pointing out that it was likely too late for that. He had no idea just how choosy the Bone Artists were. Uncle Steve had already been attacked once. Had he, Abby, and Jordan been added to their debt list of people to eradicate?