Don't Explain: An Artie Deemer Mystery (18 page)

T
here were no strangers to shoot at next morning, so I left the cannon under the bed and joined Crystal on the porch. She was sitting on the railing still in her nightgown.

“Look at the colors,” she said about Dog Cove. “They’re so bright they sting my eyes. I like it here, Artie, but then I’m trying to run away, too.”

“From what?”

“I dreamed last night that I was playing Gracie Cobb on ESPN. Gracie was wearing a tux, but I was naked except for a pair of tennis shoes. When I leaned down to shoot, people made remarks about my ass.”

“Aww.” I sat beside her, put my arm around her shoulders. “That’s awful.”

“Would you mind if I lived off Jellyroll for a while, I mean if it came to that?”

“No, I wouldn’t. Do you mean you’re quitting?”

“Thinking about it. I’ve been playing bad for six months. But I wouldn’t really live off Jellyroll.”

“No, that would be immoral. I could probably exploit some connections and get you a job loading concrete blocks over in Jersey. Come on, it’s just a bad time. You’ve got the talent. You’ll come back.” But I knew what she was fearing. Her mind wasn’t right just now, and maybe it never would be. If so, I hoped it wouldn’t be because she lived with me.

“Look!” She pointed over my head toward the coastal hill at Jellyroll.

He was sprinting full tilt up the trail on the heels of the pack. We didn’t exactly see whole dogs, just parts, a swish of tail, rustling ferns and bushes, a flash of fur. They must have skulked silently down here to pick him up—

“Jellyroll, you stop! Bad!”

But he didn’t. He chose the pack, the wild. They sprinted together up the trail, barking and baying, taking themselves very seriously, like predators on the tundra with survival at stake. I’ll admit that hurt my feelings a little.

“Wow,” said Crystal. “Has he ever done that before?”

“Never.”

“I’ll go get some clothes on, we can go after him.”

“We’ll never catch him if he doesn’t want to be caught.”

“I know.”

Nevertheless, we hustled up the trail. In places it grew too steep to walk upright without a handhold, in others it turned rocky and precarious, threatened to dump us over the edge. We didn’t have the shoes for this kind of going, but the view was exquisite. We looked back on the boathouse nestled so sweetly in the crotch of the cove. We saw two ospreys circling at eye level. Looking the other way, we could see the Dogs. Out on the ocean, a brisk wind seemed to be kicking up whitecaps. The air was as clear as any air I’d ever breathed. My eyes, like Crystal’s, stung with the unaccustomed transparency of it.

All during the hike, we heard the dogs whooping and laughing in the distance. Maybe he was now a feral thing. An island dog. Maybe Jellyroll’d never mind me again. We’d eye each other nervously across the gulf of natural selection. Then the sound stopped abruptly.

We hurried on. We got close enough to see the underbrush moving, but we couldn’t see any actual dogs until we climbed a steep, rocky stretch, rounded a bend, and came upon a swirling mass of them, undifferentiated, tails flashing, nails skittering on a bald dome of granite rock in a little clearing. Jellyroll was in the
thick of it, eyes wide with pack energy. When they saw us, the other dogs bolted, and Jellyroll made to go with them—

“You stay!”

He did, and I was relieved. I wasn’t sure he would. But he wouldn’t look around at me.

“Hi, Jellyroll,” said Crystal, but he still didn’t turn around.

His back was hunched, his head and tail lowered. That posture meant only one thing. He had something in his mouth. Jellyroll is an eater. I’ve taken hideous things out of his craw in the park, on the street, at the beach, things I wouldn’t even want to mention. Chicken bones, petrified pizza crusts, things like that are typical fare. Without constant vigilance, he’ll ingest anything that isn’t a mineral. And since he has that weak stomach, his scavenging results in unspeakable expulsions.

“What’s he got?” Crystal wondered.

He still didn’t turn around. I approached him. “You better stay,” I said in my serious dog handler voice. “Crystal, watch the look I get:
Drop
.” He dropped, the thing clattered, and then slowly he looked back at me with a smoldering stink eye.

“Oh, nasty,” she giggled.

Clattered? What had clattered? He stood over the thing motionlessly, guarding it like a hyena. A deer femur, I decided. That would clatter when dropped. Jellyroll doesn’t find many dead deer in Riverside Park. He would love a good femur. Or it could be that other part of the mammalian leg bone? What was that part called? But wait a minute, hadn’t Dwight told me that there were no deer on Kempshall Island?

Crystal saw it first. She gasped urgently. Crystal had one hand slapped across her mouth, the other pointed at the thing. “A hand,” she said in a tense, even voice.

We bent from the waist, heads together, watching it. That’s what it was, all right. A hand. The hand was barely attached by dried, black gristle to an arm bone. We stood over it timidly, as if it would leap at our throats like the hand of the Mummy. Okay,
what were the rational possibilities here, if we dismissed the Mummy? That this was an ancient Indian burial ground, and the dogs, or something, had disturbed it. This region was probably alive with Native American burial sites—

Birch tree trunks creaked together overhead, but no cooling breeze made it down to us on the granite dome. I knelt beside the arm. Crystal squatted on her haunches. We peered at the bones. They did not look like those on a stand in my chiropractor’s office. These bones were not white and they were not clean. They were brown like roots or things of the earth. Dust-to-dust things. They looked like the bones you see exhumed on ITN reports about death-squad massacres. The flesh was not entirely gone, but the desiccated leathery patches clinging to the bone had nothing to do with living flesh. On some spots, as between the first and second knuckles, hair still clung to the flesh.

“Do you want to look for the rest of him? Or do you not want to look for the rest of him?” Crystal asked.

“I guess it’s that simple.”

“I don’t see how we can not look, do you?”

“Yes.”

The arm lay at the outer slope of the shallow dome, which was about half the size of a tennis court. Crystal went one way around, I went the other. I didn’t want to find him. Why was I searching?

Cracks and fissures ran through the rock. Probably about four hundred million years ago it was molten matter pressing upward at the cooler crust of the earth. This is where it came to rest, at least as far as human time is concerned. Trees blotted out our view of all but the sky directly above. While I circled, Jellyroll guarded his find, still hoping I’d change my mind. There were dog tracks around the edges of the dome where boulders and pine needles gave way to brown dirt, the same color brown as the arm and hand bones.

I had done half a lap when I saw the next piece of him. A foot and shinbone, including knee, stuck up from a crack between two
big boulders. There was a sickly comic quality about the way it stuck up like that, as if its owner, sensing mortality, had tried to hide by ostriching himself down the hole. Part of a sock was still visible around the ankle. Had the dogs done this, spread him out like this?

“Artie,” called Crystal in a fading voice, “over here.” She was ninety degrees away from me. “I found some more of him. Christ.”

I went to her.

The pelvis lay flat in the dirt. His thighbones spread out from it at obscene angles. His spine lay visible, curled like a snake under a delicate fern leaf. The cushioning material between the vertebrae had turned black.

“I think I’ve seen enough. How about you?”

“Me too—” Then she gave out with a high whine of a sound that ran down my spine like icy rain, the kind of sound one might make as a sharp, thin blade penetrated one’s belly. She pointed at the guy’s skull.

He was staring at the sky, and we were looking up into his braincase from under his chin, through the arch of his lower jaw, which wasn’t there. I was soaked with sweat. I touched Crystal’s back as we moved three steps toward the thing. Her shirt was plastered to her spine. Sweat was a sign of life here in the leafy charnel house. Her shoulders were hunched, and she grasped her cheeks with both hands.

The skull was lying on brown earth at the edge of a small cave. It was the same kind of cave I’d seen on the other hill, where the granite was wildcat, as Dwight had called it. Five vertebrae trailed the skull, but they were nearly buried in the dirt.

“You don’t think this is some kind of practical joke on the city slickers, do you?” asked Crystal quietly.

“No.”

“I don’t either.”

We stepped closer…

“Aw, Jesus, Artie, he’s been murdered!”

“Yeah,” I mouthed dryly.

You didn’t need to be a pathologist to know that this guy didn’t die of old age. His skull was split from the top of the crown to the bridge of the nose. Earth nearly filled the brain cavity. Cracks spiderwebbed out from the ragged edge. Had he seen the blow coming and screamed in terror? Had it hurt? There were dog tracks all around in the soft brown dirt of the forest floor. Crystal and I leaned over and peered down at his hollow eye sockets as though he had something to impart to us, but he was eloquently silent.

I suddenly felt like an intruder, but it wasn’t our fault. This rude intimacy had been forced on us. We didn’t want it. Dogs will be dogs. I felt like apologizing to the poor soul for seeing him that ultimately naked. But at the same time something else was bothering me—

Why now? If this person had been dead long enough to decompose this thoroughly, why only now were the dogs finding his bones? Or could it be that they had dug him out of his wildcat crypt generations ago, and they took visitors to see their bones like the siblings in
To Kill a Mockingbird
take the new boy to see Boo Radley’s house? That was probably it. Dogs dug the poor bastard up ages ago…If so, wouldn’t some person have found them by now?

“Artie, do you think it’s Kempshall?”

I envisioned calling Clayton: “We sure enjoy your place, met your dad.”

“Artie—?”

“Hmmm?”

“I think I’d like to get out of here right now.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“I feel like we’re being watched.”

“You do? You mean figuratively?”

“No, I mean literally.”

I circled in place. I didn’t see anything except trees and sky. And bones.

“It’s probably just a feeling, though,” she said stiffly. “I’m sure we’re not
really
being watched.”

“Naa, who’d be watching us?”

I slapped my thigh. Hard. Jellyroll appeared at it. I looked down at him, he up at me. He was looking a little edgy himself. His ears were flat against his skull. His upper lip stuck to a canine. The three of us started backing toward the trail down the hill.

“I still feel it—” said Crystal.

We went slowly at first, but with quickening pace. Soon we were hotfooting it down that path. We didn’t exactly run, but we didn’t slow down until the trail leveled out along the shore. It felt better to have the water nearby. Without trying, I could smell myself, the stink of mortal fear. Jellyroll walked at my ankles, peering up into my face. He doesn’t have much feeling for human remains, but he knows when I’m shook. It undermines his faith in the order of things. Sometimes I find the responsibility burdensome.

“I’m sorry,” said Crystal.

“What? Why?”

“For scaring us. I just felt creepy.”

“Understandable.”

“Does anybody ever swim here?”

“Walrus, maybe.”

Unseen birds twittered sweetly. They didn’t give a shit about human business.

“I want to.”

“I think people die of exposure in that water, Crystal.”

“I want that feeling off of me.” She stripped off her shirt. Leaning against a white pine tree trunk, she removed her jeans. In a pair of powder-blue panties alone, she padded down to the rocks. I looked both ways. There were no boats except ours at anchor in the bay. She covered her breasts with her forearms as if that would protect them from the searing cold, and in she went. It took her breath away. Watching her it took mine, too.

She gasped and hissed and screamed all at once. I wanted her suddenly, deeply, but I wasn’t willing to enter that water. She swam a few strokes out into the cove. Then she turned and raced ashore. I met her on the rocks with her shirt. I rubbed her body with it as she gasped in my arms. I wanted to make love, and further, I thought it was important that we do so. Even before we called the police.

I mentioned that to Crystal as we hustled toward the house.

It sounded good to her, she said.

SEVENTEEN

T
he skull was gone. The spine was gone, and so were the ribs. There was no pelvis, no arm or leg bones. Even the dog tracks were gone. There was no sign that bones or dogs—or Crystal and I—had ever been anywhere near this particular location.

Sweaty and dirty, Cabot County Sheriff Theodore Kelso climbed out of the ex-crypt. Almost three hours had passed since our last trip up here. It had taken that long to get the message to Kelso and for him to come to Kempshall Island. Crystal, who had made the call, did not mention the bones on the telephone. We didn’t say a word about bones until Kelso arrived in person. But now the bones were gone without a trace. Someone had obviously been here in the last three hours. The killer? And whose bones were they? And did Kelso think we were bullshitting him?