The Bone Parade (17 page)

I’ve done simply horrendous things to pets to get a family frothing. Nothing like messing with kitty to whip them into a frenzy. I can almost guarantee you that if I’d been about to sodomize a little pussycat of Jolly Roger’s, he would have been a lot more worked up than that pathetic “I … beg … of … you …” business would suggest.

I’ve had them pump iron like monsters for days after one of my “incidents.” As for Diamond Girl herself, I saw this as an opportunity to call her bluff, to see if all her fanny wagging would actually mean something.

As I settled behind her, she looked back and raised her eyebrows. She might as well have been asking me what I was waiting for.
Go for it, dude.

I yanked her sweatpants down without any further warning, not a word to her or to the peanut gallery with their whimpering protests. I did it, I’ll admit, with the urgency of a man who had been restraining himself for far too long.

Her panties were cockeyed from the force I’d used on her sweats, so before I cut them off I positioned them perfectly so that they were as symmetrical as a sweet summer peach.

I pulled out my switchblade, the one I used to prick Sonny-boy’s cheek in the van, and the blade snapped open with a distinctly metallic click that proved impressive in the silence of those teeming seconds. Then I slid the blade under the right band of her bikini brief. I lifted it no more than an inch before the blade bit through the fabric and the elastic snapped apart with a most pleasing sound.

All of her right cheek and the top of her crack appeared naked before me. I saw that precious tan line, and the fabric gently rumpled against her skin. I leaned over and kissed her body’s plushest flesh, avoiding the precariously balanced panty, as I felt no rush to disturb its delicately compromised position.

The silence in the seconds that followed was complete. I had, after all, a knife in my hand, and their daughter so fully at my mercy.

I sliced through the other side of the panty, and it fell as a place mat to the earthen floor.

At that point I stood, for I was still clothed, and folded the blade back into the casing with another definable click. I shed my shorts and T-shirt. My member was engorged, and I could see June stealing glances, her rabid eyes darting between it and Diamond Girl’s lovely offering, as if she had defined the physics of space, and found her daughter wanting.

Then I heard her husband’s boorish voice again,

“She’s a virgin, you asshole.”

Jolly Roger cracks me up. If there’s an inappropriate comment, or time to say it, he homes right in. A virgin? He must have been hallucinating. The girl was no more a virgin than Madonna.

As it was, I restrained my humor and focused on the work at hand. I found Diamond Girl as silky as I’d imagined, and given the vividness of all my imaginings, she was living up to a great deal. And her enthusiasm was quite extraordinary. Her moans bordered on screams. That’s when all hell broke loose.

I didn’t even notice anything amiss until June started shouting, and when I did look up it was with the greatest reluctance, for my eyes had been feasting on the slope of Diamond Girl’s lower back, the way all that lean, muscular tissue tapered into the firm cushions of her buttocks. Only moments before I had kissed her back, run my tongue up her spine, tracing the trail my hand had made when I first touched her in the van, when I gave her water and felt all those bony protrusions. I was still savoring the taste of her, the succulence of her taut youth, and experiencing her truly exquisite muscle control, the kind you generally don’t find in women until they’ve learned their Kegels, when June started her inane, though helpful, screeching. At that particular moment, I had no more interest in a stupid blundering move by Kerry Waters than I would have had in partaking of a prayer service; but there she was, cow-eyed on the other side of the cellar performing her uncharitable act of coitus interruptus.

What actually infuriated me the most in those first few moments was the indignity of having to run off in the buff with my eager penis bobbing wildly and slapping my legs and belly like a punch-drunk boxer bouncing off the ropes.

Then I skinned my damn knee taking her down; but the biggest surprise came
after
I cuffed Her Rankness, tied her to the cage, and said, “All right now, where were we?” The answer that followed would have shocked most mortals. It even managed to surprise me. I looked down to see Diamond Girl kneeling like a dog begging for a bone, holding her hands up in front of her chest like paws … with my
knife
in her mouth. I’d run off without it. I’d left my shorts there too.

I took the moist knife from her, and rushed to search my pockets for the key to the cage and the one to her collar. Gone! But when I turned to her, she held them pursed between her lips.

She could have freed herself, she could have freed her family. It would have been a nightmare down here. But Diamond Girl didn’t do any of those things. Instead, she betrayed her family, and her own possible survival.

From behind me I heard someone pounding the cage. It was Jolly Roger. At first he appeared speechless, suitably dumbstruck for words, and for once I thought I’d be spared his limited capacity for expression, but he finally found his voice and bellowed,

“You stupid fucking slut!”

“But Rog,” I reminded him, all smiles, “you said she was a virgin. Remember? ‘She’s … a … virgin.’”

And I calmly turned back to the ministrations I’d been performing so well before I was so rudely interrupted.

Control. Always in control.

N
UDE CLASS
. L
AUREN COULD FEEL
extra energy in the air this morning, the added buzz that came when a lovely body would soon pose in the center of the studio.

All eleven of her students settled at their workstations. Only one remained empty, and when she saw it a feeling of dread swirled through her system. It would have been Kerry’s, if she hadn’t taken the internship. And if she hadn’t taken the internship, Lauren reminded herself grimly, she wouldn’t have turned up missing in Utah either. Stassler had reported her disappearance two days ago. Lauren had made frantic calls to the sheriff’s office, Moab Search and Rescue, and to Ashley Stassler himself, though he hadn’t bothered returning them. How could Kerry just disappear?

Lauren looked to her left and right, and realized that if the twelve tables around the posing platform were a clock, the empty workstation stood at midnight. Or noon? The question made her feel strange, superstitious in fact; but recognizing this did not settle the goose bumps that speckled her arms, or turn her thoughts away from the missing girl. Kerry had excelled with the human form, even when she chose not to replicate it exactly. She had the kind of control that let her allude to a muscle or tendon, or a feature on the face, and then transcend the literalness to find more in her medium than mere representation would allow. Lauren found it inconceivable that a girl with so much talent could simply be whisked off the planet, swept away like so much dust.

A piece of Styrofoam snapped loudly, like a branch over a knee, as Melanie, pigtails and pink sweater again today, wedged together chunks to bulk up the armature of her sculpture. Most of them had already roughed out the shape of the model’s body with the Styro, two by fours, and empty water bottles, along with ample handfuls of dripping plaster. They would add more plaster this morning until they had enough mass to start cutting, chipping, and chiseling the legs and arms, head and torso, breasts and buttocks.

The model, Joy Anders, waited until the students started sorting out their supplies and tools before she took off her sweater, scarf, and kiwi-colored top. She wore no bra. No underpants either. She lay down on a white sheet, and adjusted an underlying layer of foam pads for comfort. Her skin was lightly tanned all over. Flawless.

“Here,” Lauren said as she bent over her, “on your left side.” Joy must have forgotten in the days that had passed since their last class. She was reliable, so she had a lot of work in the department. “That’s it, with your calves and thighs at a right angle.”

She gestured above Joy, but never touched her. The girl’s legs came into position.

“Now, we want that little twist in your stomach again, with your shoulders back.”

Joy moved as easily as a yogini, although the position wasn’t that challenging: her upper body faced the ceiling at a slight angle to her hips, enough to emphasize the structure of her chest, ribs, and abdomen. Classic hourglass.

Most times Lauren hardly noticed the nakedness of a body in a studio. She’d spent hundreds of hours in nude classes, took them as a student, taught them as a professor, but Joy had the most amazing tattoos. An amber and aqua green fairy flared up from her sparse pubic hair to just above her belly button. The fairy was a generously winged creature, perhaps the most attractive tattoo Lauren had ever seen, which was saying a lot about very little because in her opinion tattoos were to art as bar bands were to music.

A more traditional black ink panther leapt from Joy’s heel to her instep, while a dragonfly—again in amber but with a dark outline—hovered right over her upper spine.

But what lured Lauren’s eyes was not flesh, however attractive, but the steel that pierced its most tender points. Joy had a one inch stud in each of her small, pink nipples. They looked terribly painful. And what would happen if she ever lactated?

Lauren asked Joy if she was comfortable, a question that felt freighted with extra meaning.

“I’m fine,” she said.

Work had begun all around them, and plaster dust now hung in the air, swirling like brilliant white galaxies in the beams of light that broke through the blinds. Several students wore gauze masks to filter out the particulates. Sanding, scraping, and chiseling filled the air as well, along with the crinkling of big brown bags of plaster as students scooped out handfuls of the silty white powder and mixed it with water in plastic buckets.

Lauren eased by the empty workstation, and thought again of Kerry. Her fears about what could have happened to the girl had been shadowing her since she’d heard the dismal news. She had to force herself to move on.

A number of students heaped the damp plaster on their forms, but several of them had progressed to the point where they needed to use tools to start bringing out the shape of Joy’s body. Felicia wielded the chisel and mallet with the dainty reserve of a manicurist.

“You’re too gentle,” Lauren said. “Here, let me.”

She took the chisel and gave Felicia’s sculpture a good whack. A chunk of plaster came flying off.

“If you just chip at it at this stage, you’ll never get it done. Work out the rough form, and then you can start taking out the smaller bits.”

Felicia nodded, and when Lauren stepped back the girl applied marginally more force than she had before. Well, it was a start.

So far only Cornelia had captured the full roundness of Joy’s hips and bottom. Cornelia had been a massage therapist for twenty years before returning to school, and her hands were intimately familiar with the shape of the body. Lauren felt this as much as saw it. When she touched Cornelia’s sculpture, the heft of the human haunch filled her hand. Its warmth too, which always shocked the first year students who didn’t know that plaster had the peculiar chemical property of heating up as it dried, becoming as warm to the touch as the human body itself.

Lauren checked the time, and ducked out of class to call Ry, who was supposed to arrive in Moab today. But when she got to her office, she found a message from Ashley Stassler. So he’d finally called back.

She dialed his number immediately, and got his answering machine again. The fourth time. As she began to leave yet another message, he picked up.

“This is Ashley Stassler.”

“Hi, I’m Lauren Reed, Kerry’s sculpture professor. Have you heard anything about her?”

“No, nothing I’m sorry to say. Not a thing. The sheriff’s department hasn’t found a trace of her or her bike.”

“What do you mean, about her bike?”

“I thought you knew. She went out for a ride and never came back. They’ve had search parties out.”

Of course she knew about the search parties, but a bike ride? “Where did she go riding?”

“We don’t know. If we knew that, we’d be a whole lot further along,” he said with a noticeable hint of impatience.

“Have you been out searching too?” She dearly hoped so. If for no other reason than to be able to tell her department chair that Ashley Stassler himself had been out looking for her.

“Me?”

“Yes, you.”

“I’m
working
. I’m not running a search-and-rescue operation here. She went off for a ride and didn’t come back. I called the sheriff. What else do you want me to do? They’ve been searching in helicopters, planes. Do you know my foundry is getting buzzed ten times a day since she took off, and every time they fly over the alginate shakes?”

“Sorry,” she said with so little feeling that she surprised herself, but she was thinking mostly about the alginate. Figures that he’d use it. That green gummy stuff could capture the subtlest detail, which was undoubtedly important to a man concerned with the physical intimacies of terror.

“Yes, well so am I. This whole incident is highly regrettable, and a terrible interruption. I don’t think I want to take part in your little program anymore.”

“I don’t think that’s even an option, not after this.”

“You’re right about that. I don’t mean to be rude, but I picked up because I heard it was you, and now I really must get back to work. Is there anything else?”

Despite his disclaimer, his rudeness surprised Lauren. Not that she’d expected a great deal of friendliness, not after everything she’d read about him, but maybe some commiseration, some heartfelt sense of remorse.

“No, nothing right now.”

“Good day then.” He hung up.

Lauren sat there staring at the phone until it started beeping. She looked at the time and debated about calling Ry. Impulsively, she went ahead, but got only his message service.