The Bone Parade (18 page)

By the end of class, only a few of her students had come close to approximating Joy’s body in plaster. Most of them were frustrated—and humbled—by the difficulty of rendering the human form.

Joy came alive and slipped on her top, adjusting it carefully, so comfortable in her nakedness that she did not rush to pull on her pants.

Lauren walked her to the door and thanked her. Not every model was committed to a class to the degree that they’d show up consistently. And who could blame them if they didn’t? Thirty dollars to remain absolutely still for three hours in an unnatural position with a single short break? A tough way to earn a buck.

After she left, Lauren wandered to the center of the room, surrounded by all the unfinished sculpture. Even the least of them had a rough form, and had gained size. Only the workstation that would have been Kerry’s stood empty, stark in its solitude.

Midnight? Or noon?

Numerous online news stories repeated the little that was known about Kerry’s disappearance. But Lauren did find an Associated Press account that included a quote from Stassler. His words almost made her physically sick. He said the girl had been unusually interested in abandoned mines. Lauren was sitting at her desk picturing Kerry lying broken and dazed, or dead in some dark mine shaft, when Ry returned her call.

“You don’t sound well,” he said.

“I’m not.” She told him what she’d read.

“That would explain it,” he said gravely. “There are abandoned mines all over here.”

“What were they mining? Gold?” Those shafts could go on forever.

“Uranium.”

“Uranium!”

“It’s not as bad as it sounds. Falling into a uranium mine isn’t going to be a whole lot more dangerous than falling into any other kind of mine.”

Especially if you die in the process, but Lauren didn’t say this. She heard Ry ask if Kerry had ever talked about old mines.

“No, but that’s not saying she didn’t have an interest. She had …” Lauren caught herself using the past tense, and winced. “She has an omnivore’s interest in everything.”

“She’s big news here. Search and rescue’s still on it, and there are posters of her everywhere.”

She told him about her conversation with Stassler.

“I’ve heard he can be rude.”

“Rude? Yes, that works,” Lauren said. “So does insensitive, calloused. Let’s see, what else? Can you imagine saying, ‘I’m not running a search-and-rescue operation’? And then complaining about the search planes shaking your alginate? I wish he could have taken the call from her parents.”

“You talked to them?”

“Yesterday afternoon. They’re absolutely petrified. They’re there too, in the Best Western.”

“Then he probably has heard from them.”

“When are you supposed to start interviewing him?”

“Tomorrow.”

“You might want to call out there and see if he still wants to do it. He might not want to with all of this going on.”

“There’s no way I’m going to call him and give him a chance to back out. It’s an old reporter’s trick. You just show up as if nothing’s wrong. It’s a lot harder for them to turn you down that way.”

“Ask about her, okay?”

“I will. It would seem strange if I didn’t.”

“This is just the thing to spice up your book.”

“No, they’ll find her, she’ll be okay, and all of this will blow over.”

Lauren didn’t think anything was going to blow over, but it seemed heartless to admit this.

She imagined Ry in downtown Moab with the phone to his ear, imagining the town much more than she needed to imagine him, the kind face, square jaw, bright brown eyes, and all that hair that felt so good when she sank her hands into it.

“I’ll be anxious to know if you get any kind of reading on him when her name comes up.”

“Me too. I’ll let … know … I …”

Ry was breaking up. She sat forward, and her foot nudged Bad Bad Leroy Brown, who’d been sleeping in her office all morning.

“I’m losing you. Ry? Ry? Ry?”

The line went dead.

Before she could help herself, Lauren was once again imagining Kerry in an abandoned mine. The possibility of such a fall made her squirm. It would be like falling into a dark crevasse, or a dizzying canyon. Like falling into hell. Lauren had always had a horrible fear of heights, and an even worse fear of falling into huge openings in the earth. She shook herself and stood.

“Come on, Leroy. Let’s get lunch.”

Leroy stood up and executed a perfect “downward dog”: extended front paws, arched back, butt high.

“A yogi doggie.” She smiled. It was the first time in two days.

They hadn’t walked ten feet from her office when they ran into Dr. Aiken, the vinegary department chair. He grimaced at Leroy, but then ignored him; dogs were as common as calls to action on the campus bulletin boards.

“I
received
,” he intoned in a lordly voice, “a visit this morning from President Nacin. She wants to know
why
,” that regal tone again, “we didn’t check out this situation a lot better before we let one of our students go
merrily
,” a sarcastic singsong, “on her way.”

“I don’t know what I was supposed to do. Let’s be realistic here, the girl’s an adult. She went off on an internship with a world-renowned sculptor. It’s not as if we sent her off to the deepest darkest part of the Amazon without a guide.”

“You might as well have,” Aiken snapped.

Leroy growled.

Aiken stepped back.

“He doesn’t like it when people raise their voices at me,” Lauren explained.

“I didn’t raise my voice.”

“He thought you did. You want to discuss it with him?” Oh, the benefits of tenure.

Aiken ignored this, but spoke in a noticeably muffled tone when he said, “What do you know about Stassler anyway?”

“You mean besides being one of the foremost sculptors in the world? Besides having made the cover of
Time
in 1994? Besides having been the subject of an Emmy-winning PBS documentary? Not much. He was willing to take Kerry on as an intern after she wrote him.”

“And
you
sent a letter of recommendation.”

“She’s one of my better students. One of the best I’ve ever had, so yes, I wrote—”

“One of the last you’ll ever have.” Aiken stood with lips so pinched they stuck out as far as his nose.

“What’s
that
supposed to mean?”

“We don’t
lose
our students around here.”

Grrrrr
…

“Get that dog off campus.”

Lauren shook her head. “As long as the other
tenured
faculty can have their dogs, I’m keeping mine. And we didn’t lose Kerry Waters ‘around here.’ She’s lost somewhere in the desert of southeastern Utah.”

Aiken stormed off. Leroy didn’t give him so much as a glance, but Lauren watched his departing figure with a growing sense of regret. And what she saw after he turned the corner was her own reflection in a tall glass display case. She felt like she was looking into the academic version of an abandoned mine shaft. Sure, you can have tenure, but a vengeful department chair can turn your every day into torture.

D
ESPITE MY OUTWARD CONTROL
, I am not without my concerns. They are deep, and they are obvious. They even have a name, though I am loathe to utter it. After I tossed that wretch into the cage with the Vandersons, I had to report her missing. But before doing this, I had to load her bike into my Jeep and dump it by the side of an old, deeply rutted two track way up in the mountains. Then I had to go back home and wait a suitable period of time before calling the sheriff’s office.

Where the hell is she?

I rehearsed the disgust I really would have felt had she failed to show up the next morning to help me with my work, but even then I couldn’t call the sheriff. Too soon. Wouldn’t a reasonable man simply assume that she’d spent the night with her boyfriend, this Jared fellow she’d had the good sense not to bring around. That’s what she told me, officer, that she and Jared were going for a ride. That she and Jared were going out to dinner. That she and Jared spent all their time together. A quick romance, very quick, as far as I could see.

And were they … intimate?

I don’t know. She did confess that he was “pushy.” Yes, I believe that’s the word she used, but she liked riding with him, said he was very strong.

And when they tell me that they’ve found signs of a struggle near her bike, I’ll shake my head in small wonder over the fabric I tore from the crotch of her bike pants and jammed around the chain. Then I’ll look up and say,

Signs of a struggle? Well, officer, she would have given as good as she got. She was nobody’s patsy, not my Kerry.

Yes, I rehearsed well for the procedural mind of the law, but I had not anticipated how quickly the sheriff and his chief detective would ask to look around.

“Yes, by all means,” I told them. “Go anywhere you wish.”

Neither had I envisioned how unsettling I would find the obligatory search of the compound. But had I said no, they would have been back with a search warrant and a set of suspicions as deep as the desert itself. They would have been scouring every inch of the foundry, the house, the barn, and the ranch, all seven hundred eighty acres. That would never do. But even so, I soon regretted my generous offer.

They poured through every door, the sheriff and chief detective, along with two toady deputies, minions. The chief detective wanted to know about a basement, so I led them without pause down the stairs from the kitchen in the main house, unable to recall what I had down there. Nothing, as it turned out; but those Mormons had left old building materials, a pile of tongue-and-groove boards, a couple of sacks of cement that had split open and spilled their gray innards, and a trowel.

The dirt floor apparently proved persuasive because after peering at it openly, and finding no disturbances in the surface, finding it, in fact, as compressed as concrete, they trudged back up the stairs. While I felt insulted that they would suspect me, even momentarily, of mimicking that crude painter of clowns, John Wayne Gacy, who turned his cellar into a cemetery, I also knew that it was wise for me to suffer my grievance in silence, if just this once.

They didn’t even think to ask about a cellar in the barn. Who ever heard of such a thing? No one digs a cellar under a barn. They walked past the stalls, the sheriff asking if I ever boarded horses, a question I believed was more personal than professional—he probably has a nine-year-old daughter who just
loves
horses (“Can we get one, Daddy? Can we?
Please!
”)—and then trudged once again heavily up the stairs to the guest quarters.

They looked through every room, opened closet doors and cabinets too. They found nothing. I made a point of chatting amiably as they moved along. I pointed out the storage room, which they might have missed, but that’s all: I didn’t want to appear overly helpful, overly anything.

I drove them out to the gate, and waved good-bye. I was open, aboveboard, honest. Well rehearsed.

Their search goes on. I know they’re combing the desert. I told them about her interest in abandoned mines, told several reporters who called the same thing. Spread out enough hints and clues to keep even the dimmest bulb burning brightly. Now I feel comfortable returning to my nighttime excursions.

Kerry’s arrival does have a single salutary effect: she has told the Vandersons that
their
disappearance is not a news story, that she hadn’t heard anything about them, even though her hometown paper did report the story in the regional section of their Sunday paper. Not even the front page. Not that it would have mattered. I doubt Her Rankness would have noticed if it had been plastered across her forehead. Like most of her generation, she appears woefully uninformed, and I’m not at all sure that if pressed she could name the vice president.

But it’s a wonderful service that she provides, this news to the Vandersons that they are no news at all. I don’t want them believing in miracles. I want them believing in muscles, and ultimately only in me. I say they live. I say they die. I am their one true God, their Jesus, and mahatma.

Other than her rapidly diminishing value as a bearer of bad news, Her Rankness would serve no purpose at all, except that she now appears to be striking up a relationship with Diamond Girl. For the first time, Diamond Girl is talking to someone in the cage. They whisper back and forth, like a couple of schoolgirls in the back of a classroom. It pains me that I cannot hear them. The camera mikes have no difficulty picking up the strident tones of June the Cleaver, the bellicosity of Jolly Roger, or the constant whining of their guttersnipe son, but whispers fall beyond their limited capacity.

Seeing Diamond Girl engaged with another young woman, even in such a subdued manner, has been fuel for my imaginings. I watch her on the monitor now. I watch her at every opportunity. She is as unlined as sand, the wind that rustles my tracheal calm. She utterly preoccupies me. My memory proves as insistent as a needle, always threading back to the mystery of her touch. I must hold her breasts again, rediscover their fleet buoyant weight and the radial heart of her bottom. But most of all, I want to feel her girlish pudenda nestle in the heated pocket of my palm.

I have not let her out of the cage since taking delight in her body, which I’ve thought about a great deal. I believe she climaxed at the same instant that I did; and despite her precociousness in the ways of the flesh generally, I don’t think she could deceive me on something as vital as this. She is a hungry little cur, and her appetites are unusual only to the degree that she’s willing to satisfy them at a staggering cost to herself and her family.

But I’m not so fool as to let her go, give her the run of the ranch, though I have imagined talking to her. I am intrigued by her treachery. It’s difficult to find such purity of spirit in anyone anymore, but to find it in a girl so young, so delectable, constitutes nothing short of a treasure.

And besides, I have purchased an outfit that will suit her as well as it suits me. She shall wear it, along with the collar and chain; and she shall join me up here, the first of my guests to be welcomed to the guest quarters.