A Haunting of the Bones (3 page)

“Don't you never do that,” her father said. “Don't you never.” He didn't shout, but she almost wished he had; the low voice, riven with menace, was worse than being yelled at.

The jug had hit the far wall, leaving a starburst splatter of milk and a series of tiny white dribblets heading toward the floor.

“Clean it up,” he said. And she did. Somehow, even at five, she knew better than to point out his hypocrisy, knew better than to refer to the fact that he was allowed to drink right out of the jug but she wasn't.

On this morning, Belfa had watched him chug the milk, staring at his Adam's apple as it jumped. When he finally lowered the jug, he gave her a sidelong look.

“What,” he said.

“You said it didn't look like Mommy would be ever coming back and I asked you why.”

He raked the back of his hand across his mouth. He wiped that hand on his pants. “Yeah, you did. Well, truth is, girlie, I don't know. Nobody even knows where she is.”

“One person does.”

“Who?”

“Mommy.” Belfa wasn't trying to be a smart-ass. Looking back, she recalled the moment precisely, and knew for certain that she wasn't trying to be clever. She was just being logical.

Donnie Dolan glared at his younger daughter.

“You don't even remember her,” he said, a scoff in his tone. “Bet you don't.”

She didn't, at least not with any specificity, but he still hadn't answered her question.

“Where'd she go?” Belfa asked. She'd decided to try another approach.

“Told you already. Don't know.” He was getting ready to rise and leave the table; she could tell because he leaned forward and dropped both palms flat on the tabletop, preparatory to pushing down with a loud groan as he tried to stand, freeing himself from the chair and from gravity's mean bite.

“Doesn't Mommy love us anymore?”

Recalling this question as an adult, picturing herself as an undersized five-year-old whose only frame of reference at the time for the abstract concept known as “love” was the things her sister Shirley did for her, Bell was a little embarrassed. It sounded like a line from a TV movie, an unbearably schmaltzy one. But she could also recall her sincerity at the time. She wasn't trying to trip him up or force him into some kind of revelation. She believed what he said. Donnie Dolan was—as she'd later come to know—a rat bastard and an abusive son of a bitch, but she was five years old and she believed what he told her. She'd honestly wanted to know how somebody who loved you could just up and leave you.

Donnie Dolan seemed to contemplate her question. Then he grinned.

“Well,” he said. “I guess maybe she found somethin' she loved more 'n you, okay? Happens.”

By the time she was nine, Belfa understood that the reply he'd given her that day—and which, pleased with himself, he subsequently tended to repeat whenever the subject came up—was intended to be a dirty joke. It was a reference to sexual appetite. In the wake of his wife's disappearance, Donnie Dolan spent a good bit of time spreading the rumor that she'd run off with a roofer named Dave Hickok. He shared his suspicions with Belfa and Shirley, and he muttered them to the one or two members of his wife's family who'd shown up unexpectedly from time to time, asking about Teresa's whereabouts. A cousin named Jeb Wyler was especially persistent, but Donnie Dolan finally wore him down with regular doses of innuendo.
She was crazy in love with that Dave Hickok fella. That's all I can tell you. He was a nice-looking man and she got herself a good look at him one day and that's all she wrote. Didn't care nothin' no more about me, nor her two precious little girls, nor the rest of her family. All she cared about was that roofer. Oh, and gettin' drunk. That was her second-favorite thing. The two of 'em was headed West, last I heard. Good roofer can always get work.

As a college student armed with the Internet, Bell had tried to find out the truth about her mother's fate. Nothing came of her searches. Technology sometimes seemed all-powerful, but if something had happened before the onset of Google and Bing—and if it wasn't momentous enough to make the history books—then it was virtually unrecoverable. She tried to locate Dave Hickok, but no one recalled the name; the 1970s were a long time ago. Donnie Dolan had never contacted the police about his wife, so there was no missing-persons report.
Of course there isn't
, Bell had always told herself.
Bastard killed her
.

But is that what had happened? And if so, how? How had he hidden his wife's body? Donnie Dolan wasn't a clever man. Why had the body never been found? It wasn't as if Bell didn't believe her father capable of such an act—of course, he was—but rather that there were no clues, no leads, no traces. Nothing.

The mystery of her mother's fate had left Bell unsettled from as far back as she could remember. She didn't talk about it—talking about personal matters wasn't her way—but it was a part of her life anyway, like something concealed in a secret box that she carried with her wherever she went.

The discovery at the base of the mountain was the first solid information Bell had ever had about her mother's disappearance. It was as if that secret box had sprung open, spilling a deeply private part of Bell's life all over the dry, red-brown ground.

* * *

That night, Bell took a wet sponge to the sides of her shoes, attacking the dust from the excavation site. She left them on the porch to dry. Then she settled into the big, broken-down brown armchair that dominated her living room, a chair that had accompanied her on her move away from and—six years ago—back to Acker's Gap, and she pressed the number on her cell's speed dial that would link her to Shirley's cell number. Shirley lived with her partner, a man named Bobo Bolland, in a garage apartment near Blythesburg, some thirty miles away.

After her conversation with Shirley, Bell planned to call her daughter, Carla, who now lived with Bell's ex-husband in Alexandria, Virginia. Carla had graduated from high school in June, but had decided to work for a year before starting college. Bell didn't know what she'd say to Carla about all of this. Family was not an easy topic; for too many years, Bell had tried to protect Carla from the grisly realities of her grandfather's criminal acts. Even though Carla was old enough now to know, Bell still had a hard time talking about it. Words made things too real, brought the past too close.

“Hey,” Shirley said.

“Hey, yourself.” It was their standard mutual opening, understated and rote. An eavesdropper might think they didn't care much at all about each other, given the bland exchange. The eavesdropper would be wrong.

“How've you been?” Shirley asked. “Meant to come by your house over the weekend, but I got tied up with a couple of things. Always the way, seems like.”

“Yeah. Know what you mean.” Bell wasn't sure how to get to where she needed to be in this conversation. She didn't want to upset Shirley. But nor did she feel comfortable withholding information about the discovery any longer.

“Listen,” Bell went on. “I need to talk to you about something. This a good time?”

“Good as any.”

“Okay.” Another pause. “It's about Mom.”

The word sounded odd to Bell, even as she spoke it; it was a common word, an ordinary one, but in their case it denoted little more than a bare spot in the center of their lives, like a clearing in the woods where something once had been but now wasn't. Shirley's memories of Teresa Dolan were more substantial than Bell's—Shirley, six years older, had been eight when their mother disappeared—but the details were still faint and sketchy, and growing ever more so, year after year: Their mother was tall and had long hair and always smelled like Dove soap. But then again, Shirley would always add when cataloging these attributes, to an eight-year-old, most adults seem tall, right? Slender build. Big eyes. Quiet voice. Patient, most of the time. At least she tried to be. She was the opposite of their father, a loud, broad, coarse man with tiny eyes and a buzz cut and stacked rolls of fat on the back of his neck. And the kind of anger that didn't come with an Off switch.

“Really,” Shirley replied. That was all.

“Yeah.” Bell paused, and then pushed forward. “Some students from Virginia Tech have been digging around the rural parts of the county, looking for Native American artifacts. The other day they came across—well, it's been determined that what they found were human remains. In an area called Fourteen-B. There's a good chance that—” She paused, then plunged forward. “They think it's Mom. And the cause of death—” Bell found this part harder to say out loud— “They're still doing tests, but the evidence suggests she was murdered.”

“Of course she was. Daddy killed her.” Shirley tried to deliver the words with a casual bravado, but there was a hitch in her voice. She, too, was deeply affected by the discovery. Bell knew that, even if her sister pretended otherwise.

Shirley was still talking. “Mom probably mouthed off to him once too often and he knocked her down and then finished the job. Dumped her wherever it was that those kids found what they found. He hated her and he got rid of her. Fucking bastard.”

Even the profanity was offered up with an apparent absence of passion. Bell had feared the opposite. She had worried that Shirley might get upset, might march out to the excavation site that very night and then turn right around and drive down to Blacksburg and pound on the front door of the forensics lab and demand details about the body, the fatal blow, everything. Shirley, like their father—like Bell herself, come to that—had a temper, a black streak of anger that could widen without warning and take her behavior hostage. Both sisters, in their own ways, had picked up tricks over the years to control that anger as best they could. Still, it was always there. It was like a chronic illness: You learned to live with it, to make accommodations for it, but you could never forget its presence. It would never go away.

“Tell you the truth,” Shirley said, “sounds like pretty skimpy evidence to me. Right? I mean, a pile of old bones. Could be anybody's, really. Lotsa crazy stuff happens out in those parts of Raythune County where nobody much goes. Always has, always will.”

“They're pretty sure,” Bell said. She was still taken aback by Shirley's attitude and was having trouble finding her feet again in the conversation. “If they can locate any dental records, then they'll be able to—”

“Let it go, Belfa.”

“What?”

“I said, let it go. Just walk away from it. Tell Nick Fogelsong you don't care. You don't want to hear any more about it.” Shirley's voice grew more emphatic. “What's the point of any of this? Huh? Explain that to me, okay? Explain how any of this makes a damned bit of difference at this point. To us—or to anybody. Jesus, Belfa. Daddy's dead, and with all the things he did—and I don't need to tell you about those things because you were right there beside me, and so you know—well, he's burning in hell for those things, most likely. It's done. It's over. I mean, okay, so they found some old bones. Not our lookout.”

“For God's sake, Shirley. She was our
mother
.”

Shirley's reply struck like lightning: “You don't even remember her.”

Bell felt a sharp hot twist in her belly, an acid-jet spike of unwelcome reminiscence. That was just what her father had said to her, all those years ago. She was five years old, standing by the dinette. Asking about her mother. Asking where she'd gone and when she'd be back. And he'd hurled the same accusation her way.
You don't even remember her
. As if that canceled out her right to ask any questions. To be curious. To care.

“And what if it's not true?” Bell said.

“Huh?”

“What if Daddy wasn't responsible, after all? What if somebody else killed her? Don't you want to know? Maybe that person's still alive. The perpetrator.” The pace of Bell's sentences accelerated. “Maybe he thinks he's gotten by with it. But you know what? Cold cases like this one get solved every day. Modern forensics makes it a whole new ball game. Come on, Shirley. Don't you want the killer to pay? To be brought to justice?”

Shirley laughed. The sound of it stung Bell.

“You know what?” Shirley said. After the laugh, her voice had settled in a darker place. “I think you've been a prosecutor way,
way
too long. You think that everything in the whole damned world comes down to trials and justice and all the rest of it. Well, you listen. It's not like that, okay? People get by with really bad shit
every single day
. They just do. Can't be helped.”

“I'll grant you that it's a long shot. But why not try? Why not at least look into it?”

Shirley's answer came at her in a sudden thrust of blind fury. Had it been delivered in person and not during a phone call, Bell later thought, her eyebrows might have been singed:

“
Because it means that you believe that lying bastard, after all
.
Dead as he is, you're still giving Daddy the benefit of the doubt
.”

“Shirley, listen, I don't mean— ”

“No,
you
listen.” A viciousness had invaded her voice. “I
know
Daddy killed her. You know it, too. You've known it your whole damned life. But then somebody finds some old bones and now suddenly you're thinking that maybe the crazy story he told us is actually true. That story about her running off with some roofer. Come
on
, Belfa. You looked into it, remember? You checked everywhere. You ran his name through about a million databases. There wasn't any roofer. Daddy killed her. And if those bones prove anything—that's what they prove. He hit her in the head and then he dumped the body in a grave he'd dug and he left it there. He made up some cockamamie story about her and some guy. And nobody checked it out at the time because nobody cared. Nobody cared because Donnie Dolan was a nasty sonofabitch and he and his dirt-ball family lived in a trailer—and so why should anybody take notice? A woman—the mother of two little kids—is gone, but nobody bats an eyelash. Why should they? World's better off with one less hillbilly, anyway. Right?”