Invisible Boy (5 page)

From that angle I could just make out the edge of another moss-green headstone through the scrim of leaves.

One machete swipe cleared enough space to crawl forward so I could read the stone’s inscription, but I shoved over hard into
the wall of vines beside me when I realized I’d been about to place my hand on the belly of a bloated dead rat.

I twisted my head away from the sight of its greasy fur seething with ants.

That’s when I saw the skull.

F
or just a second I thought I was looking at an ostrich egg, a buttery off-white oval dappled with shifting spangles of green-gold
light.

Not egg, bone.

Had someone dug up this forgotten grave?
No.
The ground was flat, the brown carpet of jungle detritus thick and even beneath the skull.

I crawled in farther, cringing when my hand plunged into something warm and wet—a pocket of rainwater trapped in the folds
of a plastic grocery sack.

The rat had given off a whiff of decay but back here the air was sweet with damp earth, an autumnal top note of composting
leaves.

From this new angle I could make out the skull’s sharp cheekbone and the hinge of its jaw. I dropped to my elbows, soldier-crawling
beneath the thicket’s low edge until I could look at the face straight on.

Its eye sockets were huge as a Disney fawn’s, its seed-pearl teeth tiny and perfect.

A child, then.

In the gloom beneath more tangled foliage, I could make out a delicate birdcage of ribs, smashed in at the solar plexus.

I scrabbled backwards into the hot daylight, yelling for Cate.

*   *   *   

Cate dispatched two kids to go call the police.

She and I edged a few feet away from the group so we could talk without freaking anyone out.

“You’re shaking,” she said.

“I shouldn’t have gone into the bushes that far. What if there was any trace evidence? I wasn’t thinking straight.”

Cate’s voice was gentle. “How could you have known that?”

“Well it’s a graveyard, right? I mean, if you see something that
looks
like a piece of bone it’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility that it might actually
be
a piece of bone.”

“And you’re
sure
it was a child?”

I nodded, realizing how little else we could divine from skeletal remains in the absence of a pathologist’s sad wisdom: no
name, no race, no gender.

The tiny being in whose flesh those bones once resided had been rendered invisible.

The child wouldn’t have come up higher than my hip standing on tiptoes. Two years old or three or four—entirely too small
to be let out of doors alone, much less to have gotten over this spiked iron fence without help, considering Cate’s stout
locks on the gate.

What toddler would have braved crawling into the depths of this place, even in the wake of an older sibling?

City kids know that any overgrown lot was guaranteed to be teeming with vermin: feral dogs, rats the size of badgers with
bent yellow six-penny nails for teeth.

And any stretch of ground this big was likely to harbor equally feral people. City kids would know that, too.

So how
had
such tiny bones arrived at the green-black heart of this pocket wilderness?

I wanted to believe the child had been laid to rest here centuries ago, and that everything else had grown up around it the
way briars snaked out of the ground to protect Sleeping Beauty and her dreaming courtiers.

But then I thought of those shattered ribs. Murder was a far more likely scenario. Had the child been killed here?

This was an ideal spot for such darkness: far enough away from the crowded local sidewalks for anyone to hear cries of pain
or fear. Even those who camped in these very bushes might not hear a child’s voice against the noise of the trains rushing
by every few minutes.

But it was also the perfect place to bring a corpse for disposal if one had committed murder elsewhere. A body that small
would’ve fit in a PBS-donor tote bag.

I heard sirens in the distance, growing loud enough to drown out everything else as patrol cars pulled into the tiny dead-end
road beside us, one after another.

The noise died out and I heard several car doors open, then the racket of hard-soled cop shoes on the broken asphalt.

A bunch of young guys in blue uniforms pushed through the gate, then headed straight for us.

O
ne of the patrol guys came over to keep an eye on all of us sitting on the lawn. His name tag identified him as Officer Albie,
but he seemed uncomfortable with the formality and told us to call him Fergus.

His compatriots, in consultation with Cate, started running yellow plastic marker tape around and through the bushes to keep
anyone from stumbling into the child’s bones and corrupting their resting place any more than I had.

The kids in our group started getting restless, saying they needed to get home and do chores or schoolwork or take care of
younger siblings, or even just run across the street to use the pay phone to tell their families where they were and what
was taking so long. The young officer did his best to keep everybody calm and seated, asking the kids to “just simmer down,
there” until the arrival of the detectives and whoever else would be needed to check out the whole burgeoning circus officially.

I was pretty out of it in the aftermath of discovering the tiny set of bones, but I still felt for the guy. He looked like
he’d graduated himself about two weeks earlier, and high-school kids are about as easy to corral as a bunch of amphetamine-pumped
ferrets dipped in Crisco, especially when there’s major drama in the offing.

The kids peppered him with questions and demands and objections in between shoving each other and laughing. His voice strained
for increasing volume as he struggled to keep a lid on things. Ten minutes in, the guy’s hands had achieved an emphatically
Sicilian range of motion.

Cate came back and sat down with us. At first the kids grew quiet, but soon the babble started up again, even more overwhelming.

I tried closing my eyes for a minute after swabbing my face with my clammy bandanna.

I couldn’t keep them shut, though. I was too intent on checking the gate for plainclothes arrivals.

Then I looked up at the young cop’s face. His short hair was dark with sweat, and I worried he’d have a stroke and keel over
onto the scrubby brown grass or pitch headfirst against the blunt edge of a gravestone.

I leaned over toward Cate. “He’s not looking too good,” I said.

Cate stood up to place a gentle hand on his arm.

“Would you like to move us into the chapel?” she asked. “It’s a great deal cooler inside, and we can all drink some cold water.”

The cop gratefully agreed, and the two of them began herding the kids indoors.

I was about to follow them in when I saw a dark sedan pull up alongside the cemetery gate, a chrome-free Crown Vic with a
fat antenna sprouting off the lid of its trunk.

We all savored the chapel’s cool interior with the young cop as our shepherd, drinking ice water and grateful to be sheltered
from the sun.

The kids’ restlessness tapered off once we got inside. Maybe it was the dimmer light indoors that made us all settle down,
or maybe it was just that we’d all worked ourselves hard on the brush clearing and were now settling into a midafternoon blood-sugar
crash exacerbated by post-adrenaline-rush torpor.

The girls all grabbed their school backpacks from the room’s back wall and started in on homework assignments. Three of the
boys made binder-paper airplanes and lofted them down the nave, competing to see whose craft could drift the farthest before
succumbing to gravity.

The sun shifted lower in the sky, sending a thick shaft of light slanting down from the arched western doorway, highlighting
the toy planes’ wake through whirling motes of dust.

The sounds outside seemed more distant: rush of trains muted by the chapel’s pale gold stone walls, mutter and hiss of the
cops’ radios unintelligible.

High stained-glass windows faced north and south, their intricately fitted cobalt and scarlet and butter-yellow panes interspersed
with empty spots that laid bare the place-holding traceries of lead.

“I don’t know what to do,” said Cate, finally. “I have two packs of Chips Ahoy in one of those bags, but I can’t imagine anyone
wanting to eat them, considering.”

I took another sip of water and swallowed it. “Maybe the kids are hungry?”

Cate stood up. “I’ll put them on top of the cooler.”

Our young cop Fergus asked if he could grab a couple. Then the kids dove in.

After that there was nothing else for me and Cate to do but wait. We were quiet for ten minutes or so, and I could tell it
was making her jittery; my shock passing, her own just settling in.

I figured I’d better keep her talking, keep her mind occupied.

“So who built this place?” I asked.

“Our great-great-great-something-or-other Nicholas commissioned it in 1857, in memory of his three daughters. He named it
the Chapel of the Sisters.”

I looked across the room toward the weathered mahogany pulpit, its dusty façade graced with overlapping arches.

“When I think about what this
could
be,” said Cate, “instead of a place so ignored and abandoned that someone could literally discard a child?”

“Do people break in other than the homeless guys?”

“Some of the monuments have been tipped over and smashed. And the local junkies used the chapel for a shooting gallery before
I got decent locks on the doors. I was terrified I’d walk in here and find someone who’d OD’d.”

“Has anyone ever messed with the graves
themselves
, though? Dug them up?”

Cate shook her head. “Maybe the parents couldn’t afford a proper funeral?”

“Sure,” I said. But I didn’t believe it, not for a second.

“A family would have tried to
bury
their child,” she said, looking down at her lap.

I traced a finger beneath an inscription carved into the wall beside us:
I will ransom them from the grave….

“The ground hadn’t been disturbed,” I said. “There was a thick bed of leaves underneath the bones, and the rib cage was smashed
in—”

“Please,” said Cate, her eyes clenching shut as she snapped her hand up between us, palm toward me. “I don’t think I can handle
details.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll save it for the detectives.”

She touched my kneecap. “
I’m
sorry.”

“I know, Cate.”

And I did know, too well. I’d seen some awful things the last few years. Been through some shit.

It hadn’t made me any tougher or braver. It’d only made me tired and sad.

And inconsiderate sometimes, like now.

Cate was trembling. I put my arm around her shoulders.

“Hey, you know what’s good about all this?” I asked.

“God, please tell me,” she said, “because I can’t think of a single thing.”

“The cops are taking it really seriously, you know? Roping off the scene, keeping us all here… these guys aren’t messing around.”

“That
is
good.”

“Wanna cookie?” I asked.

Cate shook her head. “Man, who’d’ve thought the cemetery lady would turn out to be such a wuss, eh?”

“You’re not a wuss. You’re just sane.”

Our young cop’s shoulder radio crackled to life, and I heard a gravelly voice say, “Skwarecki’s here. Now we’re waiting on
the ME.”

I wondered what Skwarecki would look like. Some beefy guy with a mustache, probably. Grizzled former jock, lots of broken
capillaries.

That was the visual average of homicide detectives I’d dealt with before this.

Fergus stiffened up, shoulders thrown back, and I turned to look toward whomever he was staring at.

I was struck by two facts in that instant: I was looking at Skwarecki, and I was an idiot.

She wore a gold badge at the waist of her knife-creased gray trousers, one finger hooked into the collar of a matching jacket
slung over her shoulder. Her highlights could’ve used a little touch-up at the roots, but her loafers were buffed to a twinkle.