Bone Deep

CHAPTER TWO

“OH, DEFINITELY HUMAN.” Sitting behind her desk, Dr. Arlene Erdahl turned the single bone over in her hand. “Likely male, because not many women have hands the size this suggests.” She held out her own as a comparison.

Grant nodded. He’d guessed as much.

Dr. Erdahl was a brisk woman with a stocky build and close-cropped graying hair. Grant put her at about fifty. Murder victims went to the county coroner, not the pathologist at the hospital in Fern Bluff, but she was always willing to answer questions when he called or stopped by. Her husband was an E.R. doc, an interesting pairing. One fought to keep people alive, the other explored them once they were dead.

She took a magnifying glass from a drawer and scrutinized the bone. “No sign of trauma. If this finger was cut off, it happened below the knuckle. Age…? Not juvenile, no obvious osteoarthritis… Twenties to possibly mid-forties, tops. More likely this came from an individual in his twenties or thirties.”

He didn’t want to push his luck, but asked, “I don’t suppose you can tell which finger it is?”

She set down the magnifying glass with a decisive movement and handed the bone to him. “Gut feeling, not the pinkie. Likely the second or third digit.”

“Ah…middle fingers?”

“No,” she said patiently. “Your first digit is your thumb. Index finger is second.”

“Oh.” Grant contemplated his own hand. So. Some one had lost either the finger he pointed with, or the one he used to give people the bird.

Unless, of course, that person was dead, and this bone had become separated only after death.

“Given the lack of tissue, whoever this came from—” she nodded at it “—either lost the finger at least a couple of years ago, or has been dead that long. But I’ll tell you what. That bone hasn’t been in a compost pile for two years.”

Jolted, he asked, “What makes you say that?”

“Look at it. The most interesting thing about it is the lack of any stains or discoloration. It’s more likely to have been kept in a drawer than buried unprotected in the ground.”

Grant stared at the single finger bone lying in his hand. He should have noticed how pure the ivory color was. “What the hell…?” he muttered.

“I’ve heard of instances where someone’s cut a finger off accidentally and kept it.”

“Yeah, so have I. But then how did it end up in the compost at the nursery?”

“A joke?”

His gut tightened. Remembering the shocked expression on Kat Riley’s face and the tremble in her voice, he said grimly, “If it’s a joke, it’s a nasty one.”

He thought about that as he walked to his car. A joke—if you could call it that—meant the bone had been planted there for her to find. But from what she’d said, it hadn’t been lying on top of the compost in her wheelbarrow, or on the worktable. In theory, she could have dumped it in a plant pot without ever spotting it. Which would have meant a nice surprise for someone else.

An innocent explanation would violate his rule regarding coincidences, but shit did happen, right?

He took the bone to Wallinger’s the way he’d planned. It got in that damn compost somehow, and Grant would be a lot happier to find that had happened here rather than at the nursery.

Fred Wallinger himself came out of the office. A backhoe was turning one steaming pile of compost behind them, while a couple of guys were feeding yard debris into a shredder that crunched up its meal, choked occasionally, and spewed digested bits in a plume.

They had to raise their voices to be heard over the din. A middle-aged, bulky man wearing quilted coveralls over a red buffalo plaid wool shirt, Wallinger shook his head at Grant’s question about stray fingers. “Haven’t heard of any such thing in a long time.” He grunted. “Well, ’cept over at Northland. Guy lost four fingers to a saw. Maybe six months back? Didn’t you hear at the time? You could ask over there. Seems they might have reattached ’em, though. Doubt they lost any.”

The sawmill, the only one left in Fern Bluff despite the town’s logging past, was less than a quarter of a mile down the road.

A logging truck rumbled past as Grant parked and got out, breathing in the tangy smell of sawdust. The piles of logs went on and on and on, a giant’s version of pick-up sticks.

He stepped into the office and found the receptionist, a busty blonde, happy to talk to him. She abandoned her headphones and computer and leaned against the short counter, arms crossed on it.

“Oh, that was Wally Camp.” Her eyes widened in remembered distress. “It was awful! I guess he just got distracted, and that saw sliced clean through. He’s on disability right now.” She lowered her voice. “From what I hear, he’s not going to be able to come back.”

“Were they able to reattach his fingers?”

“Only two of them.” She wrinkled her nose. “The other two were practically ground up, is what I heard.” Her tone brightened. “But at least he didn’t cut off his thumb, too.”

“Do you have an address for him?”

She did, and shared it.

Wally lived a good fifteen minutes outside of town, deeper in the Cascade foothills. The two-lane, yellow-striped road wound along the river by new developments of outsize, suburban houses that looked misplaced in this rural setting even if they did sit on five-acre lots, dairy farms held on to by stubborn old-timers and second-growth forest. Not far above, snow clung to the trees, defying the promises of spring at the nursery.

He found the address scrawled in white paint on the side of a dented mailbox and turned onto a rutted dirt driveway that led to a run-down, single-wide mobile home and rusting metal shop or garage. A couple of enormous mixed-breed dogs came howling from a hole beneath the porch to circle his car, froth splattering the window and claws scratching the paint job as he slowed.

Since their tails wagged furiously as they waited for him to get out, Grant took a chance and opened the door. Apparently he was the high point of their day. He petted, told them they were good dogs, and they happily bounded ahead of him across the frozen yard to the trailer.

He’d have thought the pandemonium would bring someone out, but when he knocked a voice yelled over the din of a television, “Leave it on the porch!”

“Mr. Camp?” He knocked again.

After a long pause, the door opened. Grant’s first thought was to wonder why this kid of Wally Camp’s wasn’t in school. He’d seen the traffic near the high school as he went by and knew this wasn’t a holiday or in-service day.

But then he saw the hand, dangling at the kid’s side as if he no longer knew quite what to do with it.

Wally, a scrawny redhead, had to be older than he looked.

He’d better be, Grant thought with quick pity. Other wise, who the hell had let him operate a saw?

Though it was now late afternoon, Camp looked as if he’d barely rolled out of bed. He hadn’t shaved in days, leaving patchy growth on his gaunt jaw. From the odor wafting out, he hadn’t remembered to shower, either.

“I thought you was the UPS guy,” Wally said. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay. Wally Camp?”

“That’s me. Dad’s not here, if’n it’s him you want.”

Huh. He had arrested a Camp one time, after a bar brawl, if his memory served him. Robert? Ray? Grant could see the family resemblance. Apparently Wally was used to cops coming calling.

“No, I’m here about your hand,” he said.

“My hand?” Wally echoed, forehead creased. Then his voice quickened with hope. “You mean, you think the mill committed some kind of crime?”

Grant shook his head, pity seizing him again. Along with it came uneasiness that made him want to back away. He should have phoned, not come in person. He didn’t want to see this kid’s misery.

“No. Sorry. We’ve had a finger bone show up where it shouldn’t be, and I understand you’re the only person in town who has lost any fingers in the recent past.”

Wally Camp gave a bitter laugh. “So I’m famous now, huh? Too bad that don’t pay the bills.”

Grant regretted having raised the subject at all. He could see that the kid’s hands weren’t big enough to have bones the size of the one in Grant’s pocket.

Obligated to say something, he asked, “You getting physical therapy for that hand?”

Wally gave a dispirited shrug. “Yeah, but what’s the use? Doctors say the nerves ain’t growing the way they was supposed to. And it’s my right hand.”

Grant wanted to be gone so bad, keeping his feet rooted to the porch required a physical effort. “You’re getting disability, aren’t you?”

“I’m twenty-three. What am I gonna do for the rest of my life?”

What decent answer could he give? It wasn’t any help to say, “one of these days that mill’s going out of business, too, and then you’d be starting over anyway.”

Because at least he would have been starting over with two good hands.

“Did they even try to attach your other two fingers?” he asked.

Wally shook his head. “They was chewed up pretty good. I heard ’em say there wasn’t nothin’ left to save.”

Grant thanked him for his help and left, accompanied to the main road by the two dogs, who cheerfully pretended to be chasing him off their property.

He felt lousy about the visit and kept thinking, Bet I made his day.

Since he’d failed to find the owner of a missing finger, his speculation inevitably circled back to Kat.

Grant made himself be analytical. Did Kat know damned well where that bone had come from this morning? Would it have vanished immediately if her employee hadn’t unexpectedly walked in on her?

If so, she was an amazing actress. Grant would swear she’d been shaken to her core.

Hugh Riley had disappeared from the face of the earth that morning four years ago, after driving away from the nursery just before 10 a.m. He didn’t get pulled over by the highway patrol or cross the Canadian border, he didn’t use his ATM card, he didn’t show up at any nursery or plant farm, including the one he’d supposedly planned to visit. Not one single witness had reported seeing his truck. He pulled out of the nursery, turned west toward I-5, and apparently crossed into some other dimension.

A single tear had slipped down her cheek that day as her voice sank to a whisper. “He didn’t signal. That’s one of my pet peeves, when other drivers don’t. I watched him go, and was irritated because he didn’t signal.” Her teeth sank into her lip so hard, Grant had expected to see blood. “And there was hardly any traffic. He didn’t even have to wait, so no one else would have seen his blinker anyway. It was just…” A shudder racked her, and she didn’t finish.

Just his usual carelessness? Just a slap in my face, because he knew I was watching and liked to piss me off?

It hadn’t seemed to matter, what she didn’t say.

And still didn’t.

Grant’s problem was, he hated not being able to figure out where this damn bone had come from. But like it or not, that was police work. Hell, that was life. Not all mysteries got solved.

Live with it, he told himself.

“THE PATHOLOGIST AT THE hospital says the bone is human,” Kat told Jason Hebert. “Right now, Chief Haller is leaning toward thinking someone lost a finger accidentally.”

“Whoa.” Her young employee curled his hands into fists, as if making sure none of his fingers were hanging out there in danger. “That would really suck, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, it would. Fortunately, we don’t use many power tools here. Now, hadn’t you better get back to work?” She nodded at the handcart loaded with forsythia that he had been hauling to the front. With their early, cheerful yellow bloom, they sold as fast as they could be put at the entrance to draw attention.

“Oh.” He blushed and bent to pick up the handle. “Yeah. Sure. I just wondered. You know.”

“I don’t blame you,” she said, smiling. “It was a weird thing to find.”

“Yeah.” He grinned. “Too bad it wasn’t in the bonemeal!”

She pretended to laugh, and he must have been convinced, because he chuckled as he pulled the heavy cart away.

God. She wished Grant would discover some county road worker had lost a finger accidentally, as he’d suggested when he was out here. She wanted to know where the damn thing had come from, so she could put it out of her mind. She wanted, with a passion that startled her, for that bone not to be her husband’s.

Kat picked up a sign that had fallen from beside a bare-root rose and thrust it firmly back into the shavings. And I thought I wanted to find Hugh.

Had the search become habit more than a real need to know what had happened to him? Maybe when people disappeared from your life, you should just let them go. Maybe her mother had been right after all, not even trying to find Daddy.

With a sick knot in her belly, Kat knew that if Hugh had been murdered and his bones turned up somewhere in a shallow grave, she’d have to relive the original investigation and the suspicion that had, inevitably, focused on her. Back then, it had made her furious and kept her from sleeping at night, even though she knew she had nothing to do with Hugh’s disappearance and nothing to feel guilty about except maybe not having a better marriage. She’d gotten so she hated Grant Haller, constantly showing up with a few more questions.

If that finger bone was Hugh’s… But it couldn’t be. That made no sense at all. Finding it in her compost was cruel mischance, that’s all.

But the queasy feeling stayed in her stomach as she waited to hear from Grant.

George Slagle was back at the nursery today. It seemed he’d wanted her personal advice on what tree to choose.

“That kid who was trying to help me probably knows more about rock bands than he does plants,” George said dismissively. “They’re going to cost a pretty penny if I put in a whole row of the damn trees, and I don’t want something I’m going to have to tear out five years from now.”

“That’s smart of you,” she said. “I do teach all my employees about the plants I sell, but I’m glad to help you, George.”

“You have problems yesterday?” His eyes had an avid glint, as if he wanted to be the first one in town to know her troubles. Was he back today to be nosy and not because he wanted to buy those damn trees? “I saw Chief Haller’s car out front.”

“Nothing big. You know how it is.” She shook her head, hoping he’d assume she was talking about shoplifting. “He bought a nice daphne yesterday for his own yard while he was here.”

Apparently her suspicions were unfounded, because she was able to turn his attention to ornamental trees. She wasn’t surprised to find that he had his mind set on the typical spring flowering cherry or pear; he wasn’t interested in foliage or fall color. He liked pink. She steered him to a prunus cultivar with a columnar shape and semidwarf stature that wouldn’t outgrow the narrow strip or make passage on the sidewalk impossible, and promised delivery of eight trees as soon as he had the holes dug. He hinted that she might give him a price break, as a fellow chamber of commerce member, and she deftly sidestepped.

After he left, having paid full price but still smiling, Kat’s oldest—in both senses of the word—employee murmured, “I think he was flirting with you.”

They were having a momentary lull at the cash registers, although through the open double doors Kat could see several customers filling flats with annuals.

Flirting? “Is that what he was doing? Oh, ew.” She frowned at Joan. “You didn’t hear me say that.”

“Deaf as a post,” her friend and right-hand woman promised with unfailing cheer. “I’m just saying.”

“He’s got to be sixty!”

Batted eyelashes were incongruous on Joan’s round face. “May-December relationships can work, you know.”

“Am I May?”

“You just turned thirty-three. You might even be June. And, hey, at sixty, he’s not December, either. Maybe October.”

“God.”

Joan leaned an ample hip against the counter. “Were you planning to tell me about that finger bone?”

“Didn’t I…? No,” she said, remembering, “you weren’t here yesterday. Well, I gather Jason has beaten me to it.”

“And it really is human?”

“So Chief Haller says.”

“You’re okay?” Joan asked, tone tentative. “You’re not thinking—?”

“I’m fine. And no, I’m not thinking. Shoot,” Kat added. “I never connected with Annika yesterday. I’d better give her a call.”

“She was by half an hour ago when you were with George. She left flyers for the garden club meeting.” Joan gestured toward the table that held reference books, business cards for other nurseries and informational bulletins.

Kat glanced that way, then said, “I’m going to be in the office for a few minutes, then in greenhouse four if you need me.”

Kat hadn’t been back in the greenhouse since yesterday, her taste for potting seedlings having evaporated. But the work had to be done, business was slower today, and as long as she was brooding she might as well occupy her hands with something useful.

Once she made it there, she discovered that nobody else had taken up where she’d left off. Kat put on her gloves and resumed work.

It had to be the uneasiness she couldn’t shake that made her so conscious of how alone she was in the big greenhouse filled with long, plank tables covered with tiny, potted seedlings and seed trays. The quiet that yesterday had seemed peaceful today felt…thick, as if her ears were stuffed with cotton. She strained to hear anything at all and began to wonder if she shouldn’t get her iPod out of her car to keep her company. But she knew she wouldn’t use it; with earbuds in, she really wouldn’t hear anyone coming. As it was, she remembered her start of near-terror yesterday when Jason had gotten so close without her even hearing the creak of the old door swinging open and closed.

Sitting so that she could see the doors at both ends of the greenhouse, at least peripherally, she reached for another seedling, another empty plastic pot, and kept working.

The rhythm freed her mind to begin circling old doubts, as if on a looped tape.

She knew what people had said, out of her hearing, when Hugh disappeared. They speculated about their marriage and why a man as expansive and outgoing as Hugh had married someone so cold. Maybe running away was the only way he could escape her, they’d said.

Kat hadn’t let herself do this in a long time. Mostly, she tried not to think about Hugh, beyond the inchoate desire to know what had happened, where he was. She believed he was dead. He’d had his flaws, but he wasn’t the man to leave her in endless purgatory like this, not on purpose.

Only sometimes did her stomach clutch up and she wondered whether their marriage could have been bad enough that he’d wanted to escape and would take any way to do it. He’d always warmed and cooled toward her, going two or three months without turning to her in bed at all, then suddenly becoming the passionate man who’d wooed her in the first place. She couldn’t call it moodiness because he stayed cheerful. It even seemed to her that she was still his best friend. Just…not his lover.

That had made her wonder, but she’d never had any proof, and he’d denied it the one time she confronted him and insisted he must be seeing another woman. So she let it drop because mostly she was happy. Not rapturously so, but she had a husband and a home and a business and somewhere to belong. Was any marriage perfect?

No, she would swear Hugh wasn’t unhappy enough to run away. He had to be dead, not to have ever come home.

But then, where was his body?

Her trowel, dipped in the potting mix, seemed to grind on something.