Disembodied Bones (22 page)

A chill tickled the back of her neck, as if
the icy fingers of a black specter were touching her there. She
could have sworn that the man knew about Whitechapel. She knew
exactly of whom the riddle made her think. “Someone who likes to
play games,” she said softly.

“And who do you know who likes to play
games?”

“The only man I knew who liked to play those
kinds of games is dead.” Leonie’s voice was hoarse. Whitechapel was
dead because she had killed him herself, leaving her with the final
little quizzical note about the riddle she would never solve.

An abrupt memory threatened to overpower
Leonie of the exact moment in time she knew for sure that the most
evil man she had ever met in her young life was absolutely dead.
She lay on a gurney and a man was holding a plastic bag of plasma
in the air as it delivered preciously needed fluids to her body.
The pain was as if someone had been pounding her head with a small
Volkswagen bus. There was vinyl under her and she could feel that
one of her feet was missing a shoe; her toes felt the warm summer
air. Someone was yelling and she could hear her father’s frantic
words of concern. She realized later that the words were in her
head and for the first time she was reading her father’s thoughts
as he tried to reassure her mother so many miles away.
She’s
going to be all right
. Ma chère,
I swear to you. I can feel
her little hands now. Her pulse is strong. She will be all
right.

But Leonie’s eyes drifted to the side and a
group of people were carrying out a man. It was Whitechapel and the
unicorn’s horn was still embedded in his chest as well as the horns
from the carousel beasts that had impaled him from below. His brown
eyes were open and staring, but he didn’t stir. The much younger
Leonie cried out because she didn’t understand at first that he was
dead. But Jacques Simoneaud was there and his soothing words told
her everything she needed to know. She heard the words that
Whitechapel would never harm another child, and she knew that in
her mind her father was repeating them, not aware that his daughter
was receiving him. But the fierce pain sprang up and overwhelmed
her, dragging her down into a dark pool of nothingness. When she
woke up in the hospital, she never ‘heard’ them again. But it
didn’t seem to matter at the time because the child molester was
dead and Douglas Trent was safe.

The phone line went dead and a recording was
loudly instructing her to hang up and try again or check the
number. Leonie put the receiver back into its cradle and stared at
it. The brief phone call seemed like a dream obscured by a sleepy
haze of unreality. When she looked up the shadows outside had
elongated into bizarre twisted shapes that bent and buckled as they
stretched on forever. Only the tip top of the clock tower had light
pouring over it, showing the time on the marvelously huge face to
be later than she would have guessed. Almost nine o’clock. She’d
been standing there for over a half hour.

When the phone rang again, she nearly leapt
out of her skin. Leonie snatched up the phone and ordered, “Tell me
who this is.”

“Lee, honey,” came Dacey’s surprised voice.
“It’s me. What’s wrong?”

“Uh,” Leonie stammered. She rubbed the
pulsating vein at the side of her forehead. She was getting these
headaches more and more often. She was taking in pills what was the
equivalent of an IV drip of pure ibuprofen to dim the aching throb
that tormented her. Even Dacey had joked about her use of the
over-the-counter medicine and then not so jokingly asked her to see
a physician. Leonie had refused, knowing she would eventually call
Dr. Michel Quenelle from home one day, but she had put it off, not
wanting to hear the sad compassion in his voice. He had been a
pre-med student when she had been thirteen, now he was Unknown’s
general practitioner and a respected physician. “Just someone on
the phone.”

“Ah,” Dacey said understandingly. The phone
calls had been coming regularly at the Gingerbread House and at
Leonie’s place. “Another creep. Don’t even talk to them. They just
want to keep you on the line. We’ll get an air horn to put by the
phone. One calls up. You blow the horn in his ear; it’ll fix him,
but good.”

“An air horn?”

“You know, those loud things they take to
sports events. The kind you pray isn’t in the hands of the kids
sitting behind you. It’ll give you a pucker factor of ten.”

“That sounds lovely, Dacey,” Leonie said
dryly. “How about caller ID instead?”

“Star 69 the twerp,” Dacey said instantly.
“Oh, hell. I just called you. It won’t work.”

“Assuming he didn’t use a public phone or
some office phone or something,” Leonie replied promptly.

“I’ll call Scott and tell him that-”

Leonie interrupted her with, “Scott isn’t one
of my fan club members, Dacey.”

“Yes, I know, but if someone is calling you
up and saying threatening things, then he should know about
it.”

“He didn’t threaten me.” Leonie was thinking
about it. “He sounded…concerned.”

Dacey sighed in Leonie’s ear. “Oh, darling,
sometimes I think you’d defend the devil. What are you doing at the
store at this hour? I bet the kids left already and you’re all
alone.”

“The kids?” Leonie belatedly remembered she
hadn’t told Dacey about how Michael was probably going to bail on
them as well. “Oh, yes, they’re gone already. I’ve got to finish
the register and take the receipts to the bank to deposit.”

“That’s it. I’m sending Antonio down with the
shotgun.” Dacey was firm. “He got a new shotgun just for the man
who kidnapped Olga. Thank God we live in Texas.”

“Hallelujah,” said Leonie, rapidly regaining
her good humor. The headache was thankfully starting to recede.
“Don’t bother. I’m almost done.”

“Okay,” Dacey said dubiously. “Call me when
you get home. The minute you get home. The second even. Olga was
asking about you today, you know. She wants her guardian angel to
be as safe as she is now.”

“I’ll look both ways before crossing the
street and I’ll get an air horn for the phone,” promised Leonie.
“But considering the situation, you have to expect that strange
people are going to come out of the woodwork.”

“Let them come out of someone else’s
woodwork,” Dacey declared roundly.

When Leonie hung the phone up she repressed a
little shiver that threatened to run down her back like a herd of
wild mustangs stampeding across untamed plains. Talking with Dacey
always helped her. Dacey believed in her whole-heartedly despite
what Scott Haskell said or implied. So did Dacey’s family. To them,
Leonie had done something incredible and she had done it for Olga
without asking for a dime in return or implying that she wanted
anything at all. Her gift, as unpredictable as it was, was part of
who she was. Unconditional acceptance was something that Leonie
wasn’t used to having and she found that it was addictive.

That age old question came to her again. It
was one that came to many of the family.
Would you want to be
like the rest of the world? Not able to share your thoughts with
your closest relatives and loved ones? Not able to connect on a
basic cellular level that no one but a family member could
understand?

Leonie snorted. She wasn’t like the rest of
the world. She also wasn’t like the family. She knew she’d heard
her father’s thoughts that one isolated occasion. Her mother had
let it slip later that both of them had heard Leonie when she’d
gone into the police station. They’d seen the place inside their
minds. When she woke up in the hospital with a dozen family members
around her, and even a member of the elders, she couldn’t “hear” a
single stray word. Michel Quenelle had suggested to Babette that it
could be a psychological problem. Leonie had been traumatized. They
had felt her fear so completely that it was spoken of in whispers
for years.

Of course mental illness was a pariah to be
banished with the lepers. And Leonie had the scar to remind the
family of her transgressions every day of the year. Eventually,
Leonie tired of waiting for her gifts to return and left, hoping to
spare her family. Living in the outside world wasn’t the ordeal
that some made it out to be. The voices of outsiders’ thoughts
didn’t overwhelm Leonie. It was only the sporadic missing
possession or person that trespassed on her journey to achieve some
kind of inner peace.

Like Jay Harkenrider. His mother, Alexa, had
tracked Leonie down to beg for assistance. She had brought a
photograph of Jay, and Leonie had known instantaneously that the
child was dead. His remains would be located on a bluff overlooking
a river. The river was muddy gray and twisted away to the southeast
and in the distance was the smog-obscured skyline of skyscrapers.
Leonie had one question for Alexa, “Do you want to find him, even
if he’s dead?”

Alexa had answered, her petite face gaunt,
black circles making the white of her eyes stand out. She had
answered and then she had denied the answer, even to herself later,
when Leonie led the police to the Trinity River bluff where Jay’s
remains were located. “I want my baby back. I need to know…what
happened to him. Where he’s at, even…if…”

Leonie took Alexa at her word, but later the
widow had screamed that denial. Leonie was to have found the child
alive. And if Jay were dead, it had to be someone’s fault and the
man who had been convicted of Jay’s kidnapping was already in
prison. However, only Leonie was available for blame.

Leonie blinked with the pain. No one wanted
to know the worst had happened. If the child were still missing
then it was possible that the child still might be alive, no matter
what atrocities might have transpired. If there wasn’t a body to
fell that faint hope, then it could be possible. But Leonie had
taken that away from Alexa and someone had to bear her fury.

Shaking her head slowly, Leonie methodically
went back to completing the day’s receipts. She knew she didn’t
want to stay that long tonight and Vinegar Tom was probably
screaming for his supper at home.

A patrol car passed the Gingerbread House as
she left out the front, vigilantly locking the door behind her.
Leonie glanced over her shoulder at the sheriff’s deputy and she
thought that he nodded at her, but it was hard to tell. A few
minutes later she had placed the deposits into the bank’s drop
drawer and sighed with the thought that the money was out of her
hands. It wasn’t much; a little over a thousand dollars in cash,
credit receipts, and checks, but it represented a good day for the
store and needed to be deposited as soon as possible.

Typically, Leonie would have ridden her
bicycle, an old Peugeot that got her where she wanted to go without
choking or threatening black fumes billowing out the back, but the
constant feeling of being stared at had caused her to take her car
for the last few days. A battered five year old, tan Ford Explorer,
it did the trick when she couldn’t use her bike, and carried a lot
more antiques than even Henry Ford would have anticipated.

Sometimes, however, the Explorer was cranky.
It generally started. It got her where she needed to go, most of
the time. And best of all, Leonie could lock the doors and drive
quickly away from anyone who might be too interested in her.

When she got home, she pulled the car around
the back of the cottage and piled out, looking carefully around
her. A Tuesday night, some of the neighbors were out in their
yards, cleverly evading combining yard work with excessive daytime
temperatures. She noticed with some irritation that it was time for
her to drag out the lawn mower and do hers as well, before someone
on the street called the Historical Preservation Committee and
complained that disproportionate grass growth was hardly in keeping
with how a 1909 cottage should appear. Weighed against the other
dilemmas that Leonie had been wrestling with, it hardly
compared.

When she opened her door, Vinegar Tom greeted
her enthusiastically, his bobbed tail doing its best impression of
a wagging tail and a coarse purr rumbling in his chest. He knew
what Leonie was really good for: feeding him that wonderful salmon
cat food and stroking his back and stomach with just the precise
amount of pressure that made him wild with delight.

Leonie was perversely pleased that someone
was thrilled to see her and she smiled at the cat, not hesitating
on her way to the kitchen to handle a can opener like the
professional cat feeder that she had become since inheriting Tom
along with the purchase of the house.

She didn’t notice the vehicle pull up at the
end of the block and turn its lights off. Nor did she notice that
the driver didn’t get out of the car.

•

On Wednesday morning Scott Haskell got the
call he was waiting for from the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department
Physical Evidence Section. A forensics technician, a man named
Larry Palacios, spoke to him at length about the evidence they’d
recovered from the crime scene. This was the same man who had
discussed the duct tape with Scott on the previous Saturday.
Primarily the rope was a common one, available at Wal-mart, K-Mart,
and all Sam’s Club stores in twenty-four states, most of which were
in the south. The notepaper was a multipurpose type used for laser
printers, also available at Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club stores.
Hundreds of thousands of reams were sold every year. The font was
Times New Roman and used on hundreds of laserjet printers that were
out on the market and had been for the last decade. There were some
footprints located that showed that someone had been on the scene
who was a size ten shoe, a man’s tennis shoes, Nike Airs, also a
common type, sold in many stores in the region, but they had made
plaster prints to compare if they could locate a perpetrator.
Perhaps the man would keep the shoes. The pattern was common but in
itself it would aid in proving a case against an individual.