Dead Man's Bones (2 page)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about hidden things, things that are enclosed, interior, inner, concealed. Things that are absolutely necessary to survival, but invisible. Things we can’t do without, but things that nobody sees, nobody remembers. Things like bones.

Now, it may seem to you that bones are a strange thing to think about, unless you’re an orthopedic surgeon, or you’ve broken an ankle on an icy sidewalk, or someone you love has osteoperosis—brittle bone disease. Bones have a way of calling attention to themselves only when they disappoint us, when they let us down.

On the whole, though, maybe we ought to give more thought to our bones. While we’re alive, they hold us up, allow us to walk and climb stairs, enable us to work on the job or in the garden, give us the strength to make war and make love. When we’re dead, our bones will be around for a great deal longer than our soft parts—the parts to which we pay more attention: our faces, our brains, our hearts. And when we’ve been dead for centuries, we may still have a voice, for our bones can speak, can tell who we were when we were alive: our gender, size, race, the state of our health, even, perhaps, the cause of our death.

Like the bones that were recently discovered in Mistletoe Springs Cave, in the Texas Hill Country about fifteen miles south of Pecan Springs. The man and child had slept together in their quiet resting place for a hundred centuries, while the glaciers melted, the mammoths wandered past, and the splendid Meso-American civilizations flared into a transient glory. The Spaniards came and went, and the French, and then the Mexicans and the Anglos and the Germans came and stayed, and still they slept, silent and secure, undiscovered by any of these. Their bones were joined by other bones, small animals, larger animals, and finally, by more human bones. Still the man and the child slept on, until at last a chance discovery opened the grave to the light, and their bones, and the bones that were found later, began to speak.

A dead man’s bones may have secrets to share.

We are compelled to listen.

 
I wasn’t thinking about bones on the day it all began—an ordinary Friday, in an otherwise unremarkable October, a couple of weeks before Halloween.

To be embarrassingly frank, I was thinking about money, or more precisely, the lack of it. It was late afternoon, and Ruby and I had just been to the bank with the daily deposit of checks and cash from our three enterprises: Ruby’s shop, the Crystal Cave; my herb shop, Thyme and Seasons; and our tearoom, Thyme for Tea.

“Depressing, isn’t it,” Ruby said. With a lingering sigh, she fingered the deposit slips.

“Yeah,” I said, as I pulled out of the bank’s drive-up and onto the street. “Definitely depressing.”

I’m no mind reader, but I didn’t have to ask what Ruby was talking about. It had been a slow week, and there was just enough in that deposit bag to pay our bills: hers, mine, and ours, with a little left over for groceries. The problem is the decline in tourist traffic, which is probably related to the general downturn in the economy. Pecan Springs, which lies at the eastern edge of the scenic Hill Country, halfway between Austin and San Antonio, is a tourist town, and the local businesses depend on those extra dollars to smooth out the bumps and potholes on the road to economic prosperity.

But tourist traffic dipped this year, and our bottom lines began to look a little red. Not a pretty red, either. Not cherry red or lipstick red or Victoria’s Secret red. More like the mottled red of your loan officer’s face, or . . . well, you get the idea.

This challenging situation has been much on my mind lately, and on Ruby’s, too. However, not being the sort of women who sit and sigh when things start going to hell in a handbasket, we’ve expanded our enterprises and gone looking for more business. Ruby has created the Party Thyme Catering Service, a traveling show (a traveling circus, she jokes) that takes the tearoom on the road, with the help of our cook, Janet Chapman. Last month, Ruby and Janet catered the annual Pecan Springs Women’s Club brunch and a couple of wedding luncheons, and they’re doing the cast party for the opening of
A Man for All Reasons
.

For my part, I’ve taken on garden planning and some extra gardening work. This effort has been moderately successful, I’m glad to say. In the past few weeks, I’ve helped an Austin church plant a garden of Biblical herbs, installed an herb garden beside a pioneer museum in Kerrville, and designed the herbal landscaping at the new Merrill Obermann Community Theater in Pecan Springs.

The theater landscaping was the current job. Marian Atkins, a longtime friend and the chairman of the Community Theater Association board, had asked me to do the layout and obtain the plants, and a group of volunteers would get together to do the planting. Which is why Ruby and I were driving Big Red Mama, the buxom, beautiful van we bought a few months ago, used, to help us cart our stuff around. Mama, whose previous owner painted a colorful blue, green, and yellow design on her red sides, is sassier than a Sweet Potato Queen. She was toting a big load of plants bound for the new theater. We were delivering them on Friday night so we could get an early start Saturday morning. Opening night—a Denim and Diamonds gala—was only a week away.

While Mama is taking us to the theater, I’ll take a few minutes to fill you in, just in case (as the folks in Pecan Springs say) you ain’t from these parts and you need some help knowin’ who’s who and what they’ve been up to lately.

Ruby is Ruby Wilcox, my best friend and business partner. She’s six-feet-plus (her exact height depends on whether she’s wearing flat sandals or three-inch wedgies) and slim as a willow wand, with a curly mop of carroty hair, freckles to match, a dramatic disposition, and a show-off sense of style, manifested this afternoon in chic red hibiscus-print overalls and a green tee, green-and-red plastic bangle earrings and matching bracelets, and red tennies. Woo-hoo. Ruby is divorced, with two grown daughters: Shannon, who coaches girls’ sports at a San Antonio high school; and Amy, who works at a vet clinic in Pecan Springs and is expecting Ruby’s first granddaughter in December. I should also add that when you meet Ruby, you may sense something . . . well, different about her. She is highly intuitive, and she often knows things about people that they scarcely know about themselves. To tune in to these messages, she says, she’s using her right brain, the side of the brain that is hard-wired into the universe.

My name is China Bayles. I am definitely not tall and willowy—in fact, I am middling-short and slightly hefty—there’s a wide gray streak in my brown hair, and my fashion taste runs to jeans and T-shirts. I’m not very intuitive, either. My brain works more or less linearly, jogging along from fact to fact in a boring, methodical way, while Ruby tends to leapfrog over facts as if they weren’t there at all. I am definitely a left-brained person.

Of course, it was this methodical fact-based brainwork that made me a good attorney, and when I was young and foolish, I worked as a criminal defense lawyer in Houston, for a large firm that mostly represented the bigger bad guys, the ones with bucks. Then I grew older and smarter and thoroughly sick of the fast track and the Houston rat pack. I cashed in my retirement, scraped together my savings, and invested everything in the Thyme and Seasons herb shop, at 304 Crockett Street in Pecan Springs. The century-old limestone building houses my shop, Ruby’s Crystal Cave (the only New Age shop in town), and, in the back, our tearoom.

Two years ago last month, I married Mike McQuaid, a former Houston homicide detective. It was a two-for-one package deal, since McQuaid’s son Brian, now fourteen, was included. The three of us are living happily ever after (well, mostly) in a big white Victorian house on Lime Kiln Road—the one with the rosemary bushes along the fence and the grumpy old basset hound asleep on the porch step.

There’s a great deal more to tell about both Ruby and me, of course, but that’s enough to get you started. Anyway, Big Mama’s gotten us where we needed to go, and it’s time to unload her.

The Merrill Obermann Community Theater is located on the outskirts of Pecan Springs, in what used to be a large stone stable at the rear of the old Obermann mansion, a sprawling Victorian, badly maintained and with a sadly overgrown yard and garden. The two-story stable, big enough to house the dozen horses that belonged to the family in the 1920s and ’30s, is a wonderful example of the architectural use of locally quarried limestone, the sort of building you frequently see in Pecan Springs or Fredericksburg or New Braunfels. Last year, the Obermann sisters, the last survivors of a wealthy family of philanthropists, donated the stable, several acres of adjacent property, and the funds for renovation to the Pecan Springs Community Theater Association—a generous gift that created more than a ripple of interest around town.

The first production in the new theater—
A Man for All Reasons
, written by the elder Miss Obermann—was scheduled to open a three-weekend run next Friday night, so the landscaping needed to look presentable by that time. Mama was toting five or six dozen pots of perennial herbs: rosemary, cassia, lavender, santolina, various salvias, bee balm, artemisia, and tansy, with thyme, southernwood, and creeping germander for borders and blooming marigolds and chrysanthemums for color. It would have been nice to have gotten the plants established earlier, but in Texas, October planting has a higher success rate. Anyway, nobody thought of it. The Theater Association was too busy managing the renovations and getting the play into production, both of which proved to be almost undoable jobs. Landscaping was a low priority, until somebody noticed how bare the place looked and pushed the panic button.

“There, that’s done,” Ruby said, as we pulled out the last five-gallon rosemary plant and stashed it with the others, ready for the next day’s garden-planting party. She dusted off her overalls and pushed a floppy red curl out of her eyes. “What’s next?”

“You have a choice,” I replied, opening Mama’s door. “I can take you home, where you can spend the evening practicing your lines.” Ruby has the female lead in
A Man for All Reasons
. “Or you can drive out to the Flower Farm with me to pick up Brian and then come home and have dinner with us. McQuaid’s cooking tonight, so I can’t promise anything more exotic than Tex Mex. But it’ll be hot, whatever it is. As in spicy.” McQuaid has asbestos tonsils, and habanero chile powder—produced from the habanero chiles he grows himself—which is his favorite seasoning.

“I’ll take a rain check,” Ruby said, as she climbed into the van. She grinned. “Nothing against McQuaid’s cooking, though.” The grin got wider, happier. “Colin called just before we left. I’m having dinner with him tonight.”

I turned on the ignition and started the van. Ruby started seeing a new guy a few weeks ago, and I was glad. She’s an attractive woman with a dynamite personality, a generous helping of brains, and a warmly compassionate nature. Unfortunately, she has been blighted in love. Her erstwhile husband ran off with a young woman half his age, and several men with whom she’s been temporarily enraptured have proved, on closer acquaintance, to be jerks. Somehow, her intuitive self seems to wear a blindfold when it comes to men—well, certain men. The ones she falls in love with.

Recognizing her perilous propensity for choosing the Wrong Guy, Ruby went into a self-imposed retirement awhile back, to get her act together, as she put it. Colin Fowler is the first guy she’s dated for quite some time. Tall and athletic, with reddish-brown hair and regular features, he’s nice-looking, in a comfortable, Kevin Costner, guy-next-door way. He moved to Pecan Springs a few months ago and opened a new store on the square, Good Earth Goods, which sells environmentally friendly household stuff, pet products, energy-efficient lighting, pest control, that sort of thing. I’ve been in the shop a couple of times and I’ve glimpsed him around town. He’s not a standout—he doesn’t have a memorable face—but he’s definitely attractive. I can see why Ruby is interested.

“So I have to get home and do my hair and nails.” Ruby regarded her hands disapprovingly. “I chipped one when we were unloading those plants.”

Since Ruby’s manicured nails, even chipped and broken, are far more sightly than my stubby, grubby ones, I didn’t comment. I shifted into third gear and remarked, “I hope you and Colin have a good time tonight.”

“So do I,” Ruby said, with a fierce energy I hadn’t heard in a while.

I turned to look at her. “Already?” I asked, trying not to show my alarm. Ruby has been known to fall in love with passionate abandon at a moment’s notice and with never a backward glance. From the intensity of her voice, I guessed that it was happening again, heaven help us.

“Already,” she said with a sigh. “Although I don’t hold out much hope.”

“Why not? Colin’s not married, is he?”

“Oh, gosh, no,” Ruby said in a shocked tone. “I mean, he’s been married before, of course—everybody has. But they’ve been divorced for eons, and they don’t have any children.” She paused. “I don’t really know much about his past, to tell the truth. And I don’t want to. It’s just that—”

She didn’t finish her sentence, but she didn’t have to. Both of us knew that her love affairs have mostly been painful ones. Maybe she was measuring the paradise she hoped for against the purgatory she feared, and coming up with a negative number. We pondered this matter in silence for the rest of the drive to her house. As we pulled up in front, I leaned over and patted her hand.

“You don’t have to go completely overboard, you know, Ruby. You can date this guy without handing him the keys to your heart.”

Ruby’s mouth looked vulnerable. Her chin was trembling. “Not Colin, I can’t,” she said, and got out of the van. “This is serious, China. Big time, I mean. Major passion.” She raised her hand. “But thanks for the suggestion. I appreciate it.”

Feeling apprehensive, I watched her as she went up the walk to the porch. Ruby hasn’t fallen in love lately, and she was probably overdue. I don’t know whether it’s chromosomal, or situational, or just Ruby’s thing. But when love comes into her life, it comes on like gangbusters. Caution to the wind, full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes, and every woman for herself.