The Bone House (16 page)

    Reich
heard Peter Hoffman bellowing behind them. 'YOU DID THIS! YOU DID THIS!'

    Before
Reich could stop him, Pete had Harris on the ground. The old man had the
younger man's throat in his grip, and he hammered his son-in-law's skull
against the rocks as he squeezed off the air from his windpipe. Harris barely
struggled to save himself. Reich grabbed Pete's shoulders and threw his friend
bodily away and stood in his way to block him as he charged for Harris again.

    'Pete,
stop'.'

    Crying,
breathing hard, Pete backed off and stood with his hands on his knees. Reich
took Harris and pulled him up by the collar of his shirt and held him. Without
thinking, he made a fist with his left hand and crashed it into Harris's face,
where he heard the snap of cartilage breaking. The man's nose erupted in blood,
and Harris staggered back and sank to his knees.

    Reich
rubbed his knuckles, which were bruised and raw. He cursed himself under his
breath for losing control. Pete watched him, saying nothing at all.

    That
was when Reich heard it. A tiny voice, hidden under the roar of the fire. 'Help
me!'

    He
looked up with a sudden urgency.

    'What
the hell was that?' Reich asked. 'Did you hear that?'

    Pete
shook his head. A mile away, they both heard the sirens of the fire trucks
growing louder.

    'Someone's
alive,' Reich told him.

    He
marched into the grass, dodging pockets of smoldering fragments blown from the
house. He scoured the burnt yard, pushing through tall weeds. He listened but
didn't hear the voice again.

    'Hey!'
he called. 'Hey, where are you?'

    No
one answered.

    Reich
tramped toward the woods on the west side of the house. He made his way around
the burnt shell of the old garage, which had disintegrated except for one wall
that seemed to defy gravity and cast a shadow into the meadow. He squinted,
trying to see through the darkness. The field was a mess of brush and flowers,
but just outside the spotty clusters of flames, he saw a flash of pink huddled
amid stalks of Queen Anne's lace.

    As
he watched, the pink bundle moved. He saw a girl's face. Scared eyes. The fire
was moving closer to her.

    Reich
ran.

    'I
don't want to hear you talking about the fire,' Reich told Peter Hoffman.

    Pete
nodded slowly. 'I hear you, Felix.'

    'Mark
Bradley didn't pay for what he did to Tresa, but he sure as hell is going to
pay for what he did to Glory. So it's not going to help I anybody if you and me
start dredging up the past.'

    Reich
smoothed his uniform and headed for his Tahoe, leaving Pete alone on the trail,
looking out on the water. Before he could climb into his truck, he heard Pete
calling after him.

    'Felix?'

    Reich
stopped. 'What is it?'

    'You
know it doesn't matter what we say or don't say. Somebody's going to make the
connection to the fire anyway.'

    Reich
said nothing. He knew Pete was right.

    'They'll
say it was Harris Bone who did this to Glory,' Pete went j on, and his voice
was broken and old. 'They'll say he finally came back.'

    Five
years ago, the buzz around Hilary Semper's high school in Highland Park was about
the hot new substitute teacher who'd joined the district. The grapevine already
had him pegged: six feet tall, buzzed brown hair, a golf pro who'd given up the
tour because of an injury. Loud, confident, funny. Married once, divorced
quickly, now unattached. In a school where most of the teachers were
twenty-something blondes looking for a husband, this was big news.

    Hilary
herself had no interest. It wasn't that she'd had no relationships in her life.
She had fallen in love at least twice, but in both cases she'd realized that
she was dating someone who wanted a wife, not a partner. In those days, she had
tried to change herself into more of what a man was looking for, but she'd
eventually decided that love wasn't worth pretending to be someone else. She
knew she intimidated men with her brains. She knew she was outspoken to the
point of driving people away. If the man didn't exist who could live with that
combination of qualities, so be it.

    She
was the only one of six Semper siblings who hadn't walked down the aisle. Two
had divorced and remarried; three had marriages that had barely survived the
arrival of children. They all looked at Hilary at holiday gatherings and asked
her in amazement why she wasn't married yet. They weren't amused when she asked
them why they were.

    In
truth, she did want to get married. She wanted to be in love. She wanted kids.
If a relationship came, she would throw herself into it. If it never happened,
she wasn't going to cry about it or spend time regretting what she hadn't
found. She simply went about her life, without wasting her time hunting for a
man who might never show up.

    Her
family, who already looked at her strangely for staying single, hadn't
understood her choice to go into teaching, either. She'd graduated from
Northwestern summa cum laude with a major in finance. Brokerages and banks in
Chicago and New York had dangled six-figure salaries in front of her, and she'd
turned them all down. Instead, she did what she'd always said she would do,
teach math and dance to high schoolers. It wasn't the road to riches, although
her own expenses were low, and she'd invested well. Her loud criticism of
everything that was wrong with public schools didn't win her any fans among the
school district or the teachers' union, but her students loved her. She loved
them, too. She was exactly where she thought she wanted to be in life.

    Then
Mark Bradley became a substitute teacher in her school.

    She'd
already prepared herself not to like him. The more the naive young teachers
swooned over him, the more she'd steeled herself to meet an egotistical
womanizer who was overly impressed with his looks. He worked in the district
for six months before she got him as a sub. She did what she did with every sub
for her class - meet him in advance to go over lesson plans for an hour and a
half, map out what she wanted him to do, and provide him with bios on the
strengths and weaknesses of every student. All that for two days while she
attended an education conference in New Orleans. Most subs groaned at her
thoroughness, and few did what she directed them to do in her classroom. She
expected that Mark Bradley - English and art major from the University of
Illinois, former pro golfer - would be among the worst, with little interest in
what she wanted from her math students. She'd already leaped to the conclusion
that he was nothing more than a dumb jock.

    She
knew - because he told her so later - that she'd been rude and condescending to
him. She'd barely looked at him, although even a glance was enough to realize
that he really was as attractive as the other teachers had said. If he wanted
an opening with her, she wasn't prepared to give him one - and she doubted that
an ex-athlete pursued by most of the cute twenty-somethings at school would
have much interest in a tall, pushy teacher in her mid-thirties, with a handful
of stubborn extra pounds on her frame.

    Mark
surprised her. He kept his ego and his jokes firmly in check when they met and
listened to her instructions and took detailed notes. He had a brain and the
same kind of passion for kids that she did. When she returned to school after
her two-day conference, she was shocked to discover that Mark had followed her
guidelines precisely and kept the classes on pace with her lesson plans. She
was less surprised that half her girls had already fallen in love with him and
were begging her to bring him back.

    Later
that week, when she did a post-mortem with him in the cafeteria, he waited
until the very end of their conversation before asking her out to dinner.

    She
had to admit to herself that she was intrigued and a little aroused. Even so,
she wasn't stupid, and she had no interest in a date where his only objective
was sex. So with her usual bluntness, she'd asked him why he wanted to go out
with her. It wasn't exactly a great way to launch a relationship, but it was a
great way to cut one off in its tracks. He surprised her again.

    'When
I golfed, I never liked to play it safe and lay up,' Mark told her. 'I always
went for the green. I figured it wasn't worth it to settle for second best.'

    If
any other man had tried that line with her, she would have written it off as
hollow flattery, but she saw something different in Mark Bradley. Sincerity. It
was a quality she prized more than just about anything else, and she had been
let down by enough people in her life to believe she could recognize it when
she saw it. Mark was a man who meant what he said, who didn't pretend to be
someone else for the world. That was her own philosophy, too.

    She
decided that Mark Bradley was worth the risk. One night. No sex. No strings.
She didn't expect it to lead to anything deeper, which was her way of managing
her expectations. She certainly never expected that not even two years later,
she would be married, and she and Mark would be leaving the Chicago area for
the kind of idyllic life they both thought they craved. Moving someplace
quieter and emptier. Moving someplace where the roads were lonely and
tree-lined and the rest of the world was far away. Giving up old dreams for new
dreams. Living in isolation.

    That
was how it had all started. Five years ago.

    Now
those dreams were dying.

    The
calendar said winter was over, but no one had told the weather gods in
Wisconsin. The wind off the bay was raw. Snow was expect overnight. The only
sign of spring was the expanded schedule on the Northport car ferry, which
meant that they could now come and go from the island mostly at will. During
the three deepest months of winter from January to March, they were forced to
spend weekday in a small rental cottage near Fish Creek, and they could only
retreat to their real home on the weekends. Hilary would be glad to sleep in
their own bed every night.

    Mark
was silent as they drove along the southwest coast of Washington Island toward
their home. It had been a long day, flying into Chicago from Florida and
driving north for four hours along the coast of Lake Michigan to Door County.
They'd barely made the last island ferry at dusk. They were both exhausted and
wanted to do nothing more than sleep.

    He
drove them along the main road leading through town, which was a generous
description of the rural community on Washington Island. There were a handful
of shops and restaurants, most of them on the west side, widely separated by
farmlands and trees. The island itself was flat as a board, barely thirty-five
square miles, with dense forest over most of the land and rough water on all
sides. Anything that was sold here had to be shipped over from the mainland,
and as a result there wasn't much more than the bare necessities for the
residents, particularly in the off season. The prices were high. Most people
waited and did their main shopping once a month at the far southern end of the
county in Sturgeon Bay, which was the closest thing the peninsula had to a real
city, unless you wanted to travel another forty miles to Green Bay.

    They
drove past the island's old watering hole, Bitters Pub, and Hilary saw the
owner of one of the handful of local motels standing next to his pickup truck
with a bottle of beer in his hand. She knew him; he knew them. That was the way
it was on an island populated by fewer than seven hundred people. He didn't
wave or smile. Instead, he watched their Camry pass, and his face was graven
with hostility as he tilted the bottle to his lips. She knew that word had
already spread among the locals about what had happened in Florida.

    When
they'd first moved to the island, they had been welcomed politely, if not
embraced. You weren't really accepted if you weren't a native, but people were
cordial and helpful, even if they didn't invite you into their lives. Hilary
and Mark didn't care about that kind of friendship, but at least they hadn't
felt like intruders. That all changed when the story about Tresa broke. From
that moment, politeness turned to cold distrust. It wasn't easy living in a
small town where you were shunned, particularly a community that was cut off by
water from the rest of the world.