Murder Bone by Bone (2 page)

Unless the bones turned into something major. I collapsed on the front porch steps, staring at the mountain of dirt the boys had made and wondering what the odds were of them being, after all, dinosaur bones.

Chapter 2

Sitting there on Bridget’s front porch, I took a minute to appreciate the morning coolness. It would be hot by noon. Our ocean breezes often die off in September and October, making them the hottest months in the Bay Area’s year. Bridget’s one straggly rosebush was blighted with rust and black spot; I started picking the bad leaves off the poor thing into the yellow plastic bucket the boys had left on the porch. The rose had an anemic pink bloom of no particular scent. Before Bridget and Emery returned, I would bring over a bouquet from my own roses, which had also found the summer trying, but were giving me wonderful, fragrant blooms—dark, satiny Oklahoma and Margaret Merrill’s sturdy white prettiness.

I heard scrabbling feet on the sidewalk and held on tight to the bucket of dead leaves. A large, galumphing black-and-white dog appeared, towing Paul Drake behind him.

Barker saw me in the yard and launched himself up the sidewalk. You’d think it had been weeks since we’d seen each other instead of just three hours. He’d become a rather well-grown dog in the past four months, with plenty of adolescent energy, and Drake didn’t have the hang of walking him at all. And when I say “hang,” that’s exactly what I mean. Barker didn’t take gentle hints about what he should be doing when he was on the leash. Only vigorous jerks on the choke collar conveyed information to him.

Nevertheless, I was glad to see him. And Drake, who looked as rumpled and cuddly as I’d pictured him. He’d had his espresso, though. Otherwise he might not have thought to bring the camera that bounced on his chest while he galloped after the dog.

Drake let go of the leash just before he would have become airborne. “Look, I don’t know how you handle this dog. I’ve got half a foot and probably forty pounds on you, and he didn’t slow down all the way here."

“He needs his walk every day.” I gave Barker a final pat and made him sit. “You could run him. He loves that.”

“I’m busy.” Drake had already turned away from me, eyeing the mound of dirt in the former sidewalk area. He whistled. “The boys did all that?”

“With hand tools, no less.” I waved the plastic bucket at him. “You want a turn?”

He shook his head. “The fewer people who mess with it at this point, the better.”

The words were ominous. I felt a chill on the back of my neck. “You’re thinking of it as a crime scene?”

“Not exactly.” I knew he was working, then. When Drake starts to hedge, it means he’s hoarding information. Anything he drops at that point is on purpose, not by accident. He moved around the pile of dirt, taking pictures. “This is one of the bones?” He zoomed in on the “cutlass” shape the boys had pointed out earlier.

“We’ve got a box full of them on the porch.” I ran up the stairs, closely followed by Barker. He stuck his nose in the cardboard box Corky had filled and quivered all over with doggy eagerness. “Get out of there.”

Drake pushed him aside. “Shouldn’t have brought this animal,” he grumbled. Barker is a bit of a thorn in Drake’s side, which made it even nicer of him to agree to oversee my dog while I was preoccupied with Bridget’s children. “Are these the ones the boys were playing with?” He cocked his head, listening. “What have you done with them, anyway? It’s too peaceful around here.”

“Moira’s sleeping and the guys are watching TV. Although, if they knew you were here, they’d be all over you.” I gave him a sweet smile. “Shall I call them?”

“Please don’t. Not yet.” He squatted by the box, his attention fixed. He picked up the bones in turn, felt them, held them to his nose, thought about them. I watched him with that strange tightness spreading through my body. Something about Drake when he focused his attention made me wonder what kind of intensity he’d turn on a woman he was involved with. I’d been deflecting that intensity at the critical point for the past few months, but contrarily I wanted to feel it, too, differently from the first time I’d encountered it, when I had been a murder suspect and therefore part of his work.

“So what do you think?” I broke the silence after he’d stared into the treetops across the street for a while.

“Hmm? Oh, I think I’ll let this Stanford archaeologist I know take a look first. But—” He shook his head slowly. “The bones have been in the ground for a while. See, they’re stained with dirt and they’re not waxy anymore, plus there’s no trace of gut or sinew.”

Speaking of guts, my own twisted. “Great.”

“Yeah, makes it harder,” he agreed, not exactly getting my point. “But even though they’re not particularly fresh, I don’t believe they’re Costanoan. Indian, you know.”

“I know. I’ve read about Ishi.”

“There’s more to it than Ishi,” he began, then cut himself off. “That’s beside the point. I need to use the phone, and then I want to talk to the boys.”

The front door opened. “Moira’s crying,” Corky shouted. He saw Barker and Drake and tumbled out the door, closely followed by Sam and Mick.

Moira was standing in her crib, sobbing. Bridget had told me that she mostly woke up like that, but it was unnerving anyway. She held out her arms to me, then noticed that I wasn’t her mom and turned away, increasing the volume.

I patted her back awkwardly, trying to soothe her. My patting hand slipped lower and encountered dampness. Sighing, I hauled Moira out of the crib and over to the changing table. She fixed an apprehensive gaze on my face while I changed her. This time I used a plastic diaper. Even that I couldn’t get right; turns out those things have a front and a back. I had to do it a couple of times before it was securely applied.

The menfolk were in the kitchen. Drake listened intently while the boys described their find in shrill, excited voices. I carried Moira on through to the living room, where the TV, abandoned, still blared “Sesame Street.” Moira cheered up right away; I sat her on the floor, and she watched intently while Muppets sang and danced about Letter B.

 I joined the guys. Corky had talked down Sam and Mick and was finishing the story dramatically. “Then she—” he pointed at me—"said they weren’t dinosaur bones. So what are they?”

The three boys watched Drake, their eyes big.

“I’m not sure,” he said diplomatically. “I’m going to get an expert to look at them. But it’s very important that you boys stay away from the sidewalk now. Okay?”

Their faces fell. “I’ll need your help in other ways,” Drake finished up lamely. He stood, and they stood too. All of them looked a little downcast.

“How about some cookies?” I felt I should play the traditional role. And Bridget had left a fresh batch of her famous oatmeal-raisin-chocolate chip cookies. It seemed like the right moment to bring them out.

The boys had grape juice with theirs, growing purple mustaches in the process. I made Drake a cup of tea, which he drank because he knew my coffee is hopeless. I keep a jar of instant—a very small jar—for people who feel that they need coffee. I prefer tea, and good tea, too. Bridget had gotten a supply of very expensive Assam; a Post-it note on the little golden bag from the tea store downtown exhorted me to drink up, so I did.

In some telepathic way, the boys decided all at once to play basketball, and ran into the backyard, where their dad had put up a hoop somewhere between Corky’s abilities and Mick’s. Drake and I stood at the kitchen door, watching them bounce up and down the patio.

“They’re good kids,” he said, pulling me closer with an arm around my shoulder. I heard a hidden meaning in his words. I have no desire for the domestic-goddess role; the closest I ever come is making muffins out of leftover oatmeal, a skill that doesn’t exactly ring the bell on the homemaker scale. Just getting to the point of wanting a man in my bed, after years of keeping them—keeping everyone—at arm’s length, was major for me. At the rate I was going, I’d be menopausal before I could commit to a relationship. And that would be fine with me. I sensed it wouldn’t be fine with Drake, though. Not only was he stepping up the intimate little touches and kisses, he had made more than one comment that seemed to hint at a desire for children. This was a problem for me. I’m not interested in that scene. And I had tried to let Drake know it.

“They fight a lot, but they don’t really hurt each other.” I moved away from him, on the pretext of checking Moira, who was still glued to “Sesame Street,” watching Big Bird sing a soulful tune about being friends. “Looking after them is very tiring, though. I feel like I’ve been doing it for weeks instead of just a few hours.”

“I’ll help,” Drake volunteered. Right then and there, I decided that if he thought getting all domestic with me was going to make me want children of my own, he would find out differently. I’m not going to be saddled with motherhood. I feel barely able to take care of myself, let alone a small, helpless person whose years of dependency give a parent lots of chances to totally screw up.

“You have bones to deal with,” I pointed out. “But if you want to help, fine. Maybe you could take us all out to Burger King for dinner.”

Drake winced. He loves his meals.

“We’ll see.” He checked his watch. “I’d better start calling, see if I can locate some people to take a look at these bones.” He shook his head. “I have a bad feeling about them.”

“So you think they were put there on purpose.” I shivered a little. “When could someone do that? Last time the sidewalk was torn up?”

“That would be the best possibility,” he said. “Maybe even longer ago, depending on how deep the sidewalk crew went last tune. If the boys hadn’t dug him up, he probably wouldn’t have been found this time around either.”

I hadn’t really thought of the bones as a person before, a person who wouldn’t have chosen to be interred under a sidewalk. “They were digging with garden trowels and plastic shovels, for heaven’s sake. How far down could they have gotten?” I tried to picture the scenario, telling myself to approach it as a story and forget about the person who used to inhabit those bones. “And wouldn’t it be hard to dig a hole deep enough to bury someone? After all, there’s not a lot of time between the crew tearing up the old pavement and coming back to put on the new. Maybe you’d have a few hours late at night to work. Right out there in the open where any insomniac could see you.” I warmed to my theme. “And you’d displace a lot of dirt, too. What would you do with that?”

Drake blew thoughtfully on his tea. “Sometimes it takes days for them to come back. When it rains, for instance.” He took another cookie, pointing it at me in an admonishing way. “And if you bought yourself a pair of official-looking coveralls, you could dig as deep a hole as you wanted in broad daylight, and just come back at night to put the body in and fill in with dirt. Or if you lived here, I bet no one would notice you digging out front if you said you were taking soil samples or something. Then tip your body in at night, cover up, and you’re done.”

It didn’t sound very likely to me. “Probably you’ll want to talk to the Public Works people, if you can get hold of someone there. I called and got a recording—several recordings.”

He grinned. “I know the magic number. I do want to talk to the crew from yesterday, see how deep they went, what they noticed. I can go back home and call, or you can let me use this phone.”

“Makes no difference to me.” I didn’t really mean that, of course. In the past Drake has disliked having me involved in his investigations, although my bad karma had dragged me in anyway. This one looked like something I could totally duck, but I was interested in knowing more about who’d left their bones under the sidewalk enough years ago to remove all traces of the person that had inhabited them.

I busied myself cleaning up the juice glasses and sweeping the floor. Kids make for a lot of debris, and Bridget’s kitchen is big enough to be quite a chore to sweep. Drake made several phone calls, but I couldn’t always hear what he was saying. I did notice that when he had to leave a message, he left his own phone number, not Bridget’s. From that I deduced that he wouldn’t be staying long.

I was right. After the last call he turned away from the phone and smiled at me. “It will be a novel experience to have you available by telephone instead of holed up in your house with no modern conveniences.”

“Maybe I’m not planning to answer the phone.” I actually don’t like Mr. Bell’s device much, which is why I don’t have one. Drake lets me receive messages on his phone, during the times when I’m actively seeking temp work or when I need to talk with the editors who buy my freelance magazine articles.

He just gave me that annoying know-it-all male smile.

“You’ll answer it,” he said, coming to hug me, “because it might be Bridget checking up on her kids, and you wouldn’t want to worry her.”

He was right. I relaxed into the warm embrace, wishing that I hadn’t agreed to be burdened with four young children, wishing that I could let myself go with Drake’s flow and forget my anxiety. The physical desire he aroused in me was nearly smothered in anxieties, chief among them the fear of failing again at love and commitment and all that grown-up stuff. Although it wouldn’t be as physically catastrophic as my marriage had been, to try and then fail with Drake would certainly be devastating.

“Okay,” I said, pulling away finally. “I’ll answer the phone. But you’ll have to let me hang around when the archaeologist comes.”

He pushed his granny glasses up. “You have a deal.”

Chapter 3

Drake left, mumbling about meeting someone from Public Works. He didn’t take Barker with him. Boys and dog tangled in the backyard, along with several tennis balls and a large stick.

I put away the dishes and tried not to feel outnumbered. At least I knew Drake would be back—after all, I had custody of the bones. Still, it seemed hard to be left with four children, all stirred up by dirt and sugar. Even Moira tired of “Sesame Street” and lurched into the kitchen. I smiled at her, and she smiled back before she realized her mother wasn’t there. Tears welled up in her big blue eyes.