08-A Thousand Bones, page 3
Damn. Somebody had to be missing the girl in the woods. At least she could check the bulletins. Grabbing a cup of coffee, she took the binder back to her desk.
There were so many. She hadn’t expected that.
Page after page of faces. A few men, but mostly women, some very young. The photographs were mainly school portraits with a few snapshots thrown in. Some of the faces—the men, mostly—seemed to hold a mild look of resignation or defeat, as if they were saying, “Forget me, I’m gone.” But others, the young women, seemed to be looking out with beseeching eyes that said, “I don’t know what happened. Find me.”
She took a slow sip of coffee, trying to decide how to narrow her search. For lack of a better plan, she looked for any females who had disappeared within a hundred-mile radius of Echo Bay in the last ten years.
“Joette, dear, I am going home,” Augie called out. “Do you need anything before I leave?”
Joe looked up to see Augie slipping on his jacket. His replacement, Bea, was behind the dispatch desk, already immersed in her crossword. “No, thanks, Augie, see you tomorrow,” Joe said.
Joe turned back to the bulletins. She flipped to the next one.
Name: Virginia McCafferty
Age: 17
Date of birth: 12–5–1956
Height: 5’4”
Weight: 114
Hair: Red
Eyes: Green
Distinguishing marks: Freckles on face
and shoulders
Missing since: 10–16–1975
Last seen: Leaving Big Boy’s Drive-
in on 2nd St. Mackinaw City. Please
contact the Michigan State Police with
information.
Virginia McCafferty had gone missing only a few days ago. This could not be the girl in the woods.
As Joe moved on, it occurred to her that there seemed to be no order to the bulletins, and she guessed someone had once pulled them off the rings but had not put them back in the proper ascending order by date gone missing. The papers needed to be in order. Not just out of respect but because it was the right way to file them. She unsnapped the rings, took all the bulletins off, and started arranging them by date.
“Don’t you have a dog to walk or something?”
She turned in her chair. Mike Villella stood in the doorway. He was in civvies, snug jeans and a blue T-shirt emblazoned with a hound dog and the words don’t let the bastards wear you down. Joe seldom saw Mike out of uniform, and she was struck by how different he looked. He was only five-nine, maybe one-fifty, but wiry with muscle. He had the dark, thick hair of his Italian ancestors and an expressive face that reminded her of those Greek twin masks of tragedy and comedy. One minute Mike’s face could be sullen, but in the next it could crease upward to a sudden smile.
Mike was holding a green notebook in his hand.
“What’s that?” she asked, nodding toward it.
He wrapped it into a tight tube and stuffed it in his back pocket. “Just my son’s homework. Amazing what second-graders are being asked to do now.”
Mike went to the small refrigerator, grabbed a Coke, and came over to prop a hip on the desk next to Joe’s. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“Researching missing girls.”
“This about those bones they found this afternoon?”
Joe nodded.
“How many bones did you find?” he asked.
“Three so far,” Joe said. “The sheriff has called in the county search team, but I don’t think we’ll find too many more. She wasn’t buried, and the animals probably scattered her.”
“Yeah, and that’s rough terrain up there,” Mike said. “Mack said he was lucky to find what he did.”
Joe looked up. “He was lucky to find what he did?”
“He said he was rewalking the area with the kids, and that’s when he found the other bones.” Mike took a swig of the Coke. “At least, that’s what he was saying over at the Riverside tonight.”
Joe held his eyes for a moment before she looked away. She knew Mike had caught her disgust, but he didn’t say anything more. When his sneakered feet started rhythmically tapping the side of the desk, she finally looked up.
“Don’t you have a wife to go home to?” she asked.
Mike grinned. “Mindy’s having a Tupperware party tonight. I’m making myself scarce. Want to grab some dinner?”
She was surprised at the offer. In the past six months, she and Mike had managed to forge a decent partnership, even though she knew he hadn’t quite gotten past the stereotype of a female cop as a lesbian looking to kick ass.
For a second, Joe considered taking Mike up on his invitation. But she knew that Mindy was still adjusting to the fact that her husband spent eight hours every day in a car with another woman. And that it took very little to trigger Mindy’s imagination.
“No, thanks,” she said. “Like you said, I got a dog to walk.”
She gathered up the fifteen bulletins she had set aside and went to the Xerox machine. The grind of the copier was the only sound in the office, except for Bea’s nasally voice sending the lone swing-shift cruiser to an accident. A Chevy had hit a deer.
A phone rang, and Mike grabbed it. Joe listened as she slapped another paper on the glass. Mike was talking to Sheriff Leach, and she heard Mike tell him that he would deliver the message.
“What message?” she asked when Mike hung up.
“Sheriff wants all of us here tomorrow at ten for a powwow on the bones,” he said.
“Did he say if he called in the state investigators?”
“Nope, but he will. What the hell are we going to do? None of us has ever handled anything like this before.”
“I thought Mack had.”
“Mack’s idea of himself and his experience is highly inflated,” Mike said. “He’s nothing but a small-town cop with big-city dreams that have passed him by.”
“Nothing wrong with dreams, Mike. You can’t live without them.”
“Yeah, but how long do you hang on to one you’re never going to have? At some point, you just got to decide that isn’t what life had in store for you and move on.”
Joe watched him as he finished off the Coke and tossed the can into the trash. She didn’t know a lot about Mike Villella, but she knew he had lived in the Leelanau Peninsula his whole life, had two children, a boy seven and a girl eleven, and a wife he called twice a day. Joe could do the math and figure he had married at eighteen.
She went back to her desk, sliding the bulletins back onto the ring binder. Mike was watching her as she stuck the copies in a manila folder.
“What you gonna do with those?” he asked.
“Not sure yet,” she said.
He grunted and headed to the door. “Well, I’m out of here. See you at the powwow,” he said.
Joe pulled open a desk drawer and started to drop the folder in. But then she closed the drawer. She would take the bulletins home, although she wasn’t sure why. Maybe to study them, maybe because she just wanted to keep them close. She gathered up her hat and keys and went outside.
Out in the parking lot, she paused, turning toward the lake. It was still warm, and the sky was a shimmering red curtain behind the black shanties of Fishtown. A gull screamed and disappeared.
She was remembering what she had said to Mike about dreams, but she was thinking about her father now. Thinking about the smoky smell that he carried home with him every night on his fireman’s uniform. Thinking about his warmth when she nestled into the crook of his arm and his voice when he read from Charlotte’s Web. Thinking about the little poem he used to tell her at night: Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.
She brushed her hair back from her face and put on her hat, pulling it snugly down over her ponytail. The fingers of her right hand found the top edge of her holster, and she fingered the leather and the metal beneath it.
A shiver snaked up her spine and she knew immediately what it was. She had been here seven months now, and the most pulse-quickening thing she had done was take a slap to the head as she helped Mike push an unruly drunk into the back of the car.
All those weeks in the academy, she had dreamed of putting on a uniform. But never—not once in her wildest dreams—did she think she would be working a possible homicide. She felt charged by all this, the sight of the yellow tape, the chatter of the radios, the faces of those forgotten girls in the bulletins, and that pelvic bone, its stark whiteness standing out against the dark leaves.
A stab of guilt pierced her, and she looked at the manila folder in her hand.
Was this what it felt like to be a cop? To feel so alive because someone was dead?
3
It was dark by the time she pulled into the gravel drive. She gathered up the folder of bulletins and got out of the Jeep. Propping open the screen door with her hip, she fumbled for her house key in the dark. A scratching sound behind the wooden front door, then a low whine.
“Okay, okay, Chips, I’m coming,” she said.
Before she could get the door completely open, a snout thrust through and the rest of the big yellow mutt emerged. The dog’s front legs came up on her thighs as his long, skinny tail swung like a racing metronome.
“What’s the matter, kiddo? You afraid of the dark?” Joe said, scratching the dog’s ears.
She hit the light switch at the left of the door. She had started toward the table when her shoe hit something soft, and she skidded. She looked down.
Shit.
She held up her foot and let out a sigh. Then she saw Chips sitting there, staring at her balefully.
“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s my fault for being late.”
She opened the screen door, and Chips ran outside. She hopped into the kitchen, tossed the folder on the counter, and grabbed some paper towels. Once she had cleaned her shoe and the floor, she stood up, wiping her sweaty forehead and looking around the cottage.
The cottage had been closed up all day, and it was hot and stuffy. But it was neat and clean, as usual. The plaid throw was folded over the arm of the sofa, the breakfast mugs were left clean in the sink drainer, and that morning’s Echo Bay Banner was already rolled into a tight bundle for the winter kindling pile.
Joe stared at the newspaper in consternation. The log newspaper roller was Brad’s new toy. He had bought the gadget, which looked like a big pasta maker, out of a catalogue, and every morning, he fed the Banner into the roller and added the paper log to the pile by the sink. Problem was, he never seemed to remember that she liked to read the paper at night when she got home.
A scratching at the door. She went to let Chips back in. He followed her into the kitchen, waiting patiently while she dumped a glob of Alpo into his bowl and refreshed his water.
Then she went around the cottage, throwing open the windows to let in the sultry night air. After changing into an old T-shirt and running shorts, she got an icy Stroh’s from the refrigerator. She leaned against the counter taking a long drink as she watched Chips lick the empty bowl in the hopeful way that only an ex-stray could. Her eyes drifted to the folder of missing persons bulletins. She opened it and looked at the face of the first girl. Dark hair. Lovely eyes. Sixteen years old.
She turned away from it and took her beer out to the screened-in porch, settling into the wicker lounge. The darkness enveloped her, endless and deep, glittering with a million pinpricks of light. The sky was different up here that way. No city lights to mask the beauty of the stars. No smog to sour the night air. Their rented cottage was about a mile outside town in a stand of pines, and while Joe could sometimes—when the wind was just right—smell the lake, she couldn’t see it.
She thought about her mother suddenly, and something she had once told her.
You’re an Aquarius, Joe, you should live near water.
Ma, the only water in Cleveland is the Cuyahoga River, and that is more solid than liquid.
Don’t get smart. I’m just telling you what your chart says.
The phone rang. She didn’t want to get up, but it might be Brad. She was eager to tell him about the bones. She went in to grab the receiver.
“I called earlier. Where were you?”
“Ma! I was just thinking about you.”
“I know. That’s why I called. I know when my daughter needs me. I can feel it. Don’t tell me I can’t.”
Joe’s smile lingered. In addition to doing astrology charts, Florence Frye claimed to have ESP. But only with her daughter, she would always add whenever someone gave her the usual look.
“I’m fine,” Joe said, as a way of short-circuiting her mother’s inquiries into her personal life.
“Did I say anything?”
“Don’t start.” Joe took a swig of the beer. Her mother wasn’t crazy about Brad, said he wasn’t “right” for her, because she had done their charts and said their moons were squared. Joe decided to divert the subject.
“Have you heard from Dennis lately?” she asked.
“Well, you know your brother,” Florence said. “Seeing the world on a wing and a prayer. Last I heard, he was working the pipeline in the Yukon or somewhere.”
Joe smiled. She missed her older brother.
“But I didn’t call to talk about him,” Florence said.
Joe waited, hearing some small catch in her mother’s voice.
“The divorce is final,” Florence finally said.
“Oh, Ma…”
“It’s okay. I’m okay. He was a horse’s ass. I’m better off without him.”
Gus Grandle had been Florence Frye’s fifth husband. Joe didn’t know Gus well, because Florence had married him while Joe was away at Northern. Joe met him at the wedding in Cleveland and once more at Christmas. He was a gregarious, red-faced truck driver whom Joe remembered as having a too-loud laugh and a penchant for Polack jokes. But the guy doted on Florence, took her to Vegas, bought her a pair of rhinestone earrings the size of ice cubes, and seemed to make her happy. For three years at least.
“I thought you and Gus were trying to work things out,” Joe said.
Joe could feel her mother’s shrug through the phone. “The magic wore off. He gave me snow tires for my birthday.”
Joe laughed. She could hear her mother lighting up one of her Salems. In the long pause Joe could read that her mother was taking this harder than she was letting on. And she knew that Gus wasn’t the man foremost in her mother’s mind tonight.
“I was thinking about Daddy today,” Joe said quietly.
Her mother was silent for a moment. “Yeah, me, too.” More silence. “God, I miss him.”
“Me, too, Ma.”
Joe cradled the phone close, waiting. She could hear the chit-chit-chit of her mother’s parakeet in the background. Finally, Joe heard the sharp intake of smoky breath as her mother came back from her memories.
“So!” Florence said, coughing. “What’s new in your life? Tell me something to get my mind off things. Make it up if you have to.”
Joe laughed softly. “We’ve got a good case,” she said, putting her legs up on a table. She went on to tell her mother about the bones.
“Well, you’ve got to find out who she was.”
“Yeah, Ma, I know that.
“I’m not talking about just IDing her. I’m talking about finding out who she really was. You got anything other than bones?”
Joe hesitated. She thought about mentioning the piece of silver they had found but a part of her didn’t want to go into this, but a different part of her knew that even when her mother was pressing like this, she could be helpful. Florence Frye had been a cop once, after all. Sometimes Joe had trouble remembering that. Her mother…a policewoman on the Cleveland force, one of the first, back in the late fifties. Not a commissioned officer, of course. Her mother had been assigned to the jail as a matron and later worked the parking-meter circuit, but she prided herself on the fact that she had a badge. Every time Joe got to thinking how hard she herself had it back in the academy, or even how much crap she had to take from guys like Mack, all she had to do was imagine how much tougher it had been for Officer Florence Frye.
“Joe?”
“Yeah, Ma, I’m here.”
“There’s always something you can use. You just gotta find it. Find it, and you will find this girl.”
Joe almost said it, almost said, You were a jail matron, Ma, not an investigator. Sometimes it was just too hard to hear the echo of dead dreams in her mother’s voice. Sometimes it was just too hard being the depository for those same dreams.
She took a swig of beer. “I’ll try,” she said softly.
“You can get to know a victim from something as small as a button,” Florence went on, her smoke-rasped voice taking on an edge of excitement. “A button can lead to a blouse and a blouse to a store and to a credit-card receipt.”
“They’ve got a search team out there. Maybe they’ll find something.”
There was a long pause on Florence’s end. “They’re not letting you in on this, are they?” she said.
Joe waited too long to answer, and Florence’s sigh filled the dead space. “Look, sweetheart, now that the papers are signed and all, I don’t have much on my plate,” she said. “How about if I come up for a visit?”
Joe was surprised to feel a slight tightening in her throat. She hadn’t seen her mother in months. She missed her.
“I’d like that, Ma. When could you come?”
“Hell, I’ll throw a suitcase in the Pontiac, get Audrey next door to come in and feed the bird. I can be there in two days.”
Joe smiled. “Pack light. We’re having a warm fall.”
They said their goodbyes, and Joe hung up the phone. She took her beer back out to the porch, switching on a small table lamp to break up the darkness. She pushed Chips aside to make room on the lounge and picked up the Echo Bay Banner.
There were so many. She hadn’t expected that.
Page after page of faces. A few men, but mostly women, some very young. The photographs were mainly school portraits with a few snapshots thrown in. Some of the faces—the men, mostly—seemed to hold a mild look of resignation or defeat, as if they were saying, “Forget me, I’m gone.” But others, the young women, seemed to be looking out with beseeching eyes that said, “I don’t know what happened. Find me.”
She took a slow sip of coffee, trying to decide how to narrow her search. For lack of a better plan, she looked for any females who had disappeared within a hundred-mile radius of Echo Bay in the last ten years.
“Joette, dear, I am going home,” Augie called out. “Do you need anything before I leave?”
Joe looked up to see Augie slipping on his jacket. His replacement, Bea, was behind the dispatch desk, already immersed in her crossword. “No, thanks, Augie, see you tomorrow,” Joe said.
Joe turned back to the bulletins. She flipped to the next one.
Name: Virginia McCafferty
Age: 17
Date of birth: 12–5–1956
Height: 5’4”
Weight: 114
Hair: Red
Eyes: Green
Distinguishing marks: Freckles on face
and shoulders
Missing since: 10–16–1975
Last seen: Leaving Big Boy’s Drive-
in on 2nd St. Mackinaw City. Please
contact the Michigan State Police with
information.
Virginia McCafferty had gone missing only a few days ago. This could not be the girl in the woods.
As Joe moved on, it occurred to her that there seemed to be no order to the bulletins, and she guessed someone had once pulled them off the rings but had not put them back in the proper ascending order by date gone missing. The papers needed to be in order. Not just out of respect but because it was the right way to file them. She unsnapped the rings, took all the bulletins off, and started arranging them by date.
“Don’t you have a dog to walk or something?”
She turned in her chair. Mike Villella stood in the doorway. He was in civvies, snug jeans and a blue T-shirt emblazoned with a hound dog and the words don’t let the bastards wear you down. Joe seldom saw Mike out of uniform, and she was struck by how different he looked. He was only five-nine, maybe one-fifty, but wiry with muscle. He had the dark, thick hair of his Italian ancestors and an expressive face that reminded her of those Greek twin masks of tragedy and comedy. One minute Mike’s face could be sullen, but in the next it could crease upward to a sudden smile.
Mike was holding a green notebook in his hand.
“What’s that?” she asked, nodding toward it.
He wrapped it into a tight tube and stuffed it in his back pocket. “Just my son’s homework. Amazing what second-graders are being asked to do now.”
Mike went to the small refrigerator, grabbed a Coke, and came over to prop a hip on the desk next to Joe’s. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“Researching missing girls.”
“This about those bones they found this afternoon?”
Joe nodded.
“How many bones did you find?” he asked.
“Three so far,” Joe said. “The sheriff has called in the county search team, but I don’t think we’ll find too many more. She wasn’t buried, and the animals probably scattered her.”
“Yeah, and that’s rough terrain up there,” Mike said. “Mack said he was lucky to find what he did.”
Joe looked up. “He was lucky to find what he did?”
“He said he was rewalking the area with the kids, and that’s when he found the other bones.” Mike took a swig of the Coke. “At least, that’s what he was saying over at the Riverside tonight.”
Joe held his eyes for a moment before she looked away. She knew Mike had caught her disgust, but he didn’t say anything more. When his sneakered feet started rhythmically tapping the side of the desk, she finally looked up.
“Don’t you have a wife to go home to?” she asked.
Mike grinned. “Mindy’s having a Tupperware party tonight. I’m making myself scarce. Want to grab some dinner?”
She was surprised at the offer. In the past six months, she and Mike had managed to forge a decent partnership, even though she knew he hadn’t quite gotten past the stereotype of a female cop as a lesbian looking to kick ass.
For a second, Joe considered taking Mike up on his invitation. But she knew that Mindy was still adjusting to the fact that her husband spent eight hours every day in a car with another woman. And that it took very little to trigger Mindy’s imagination.
“No, thanks,” she said. “Like you said, I got a dog to walk.”
She gathered up the fifteen bulletins she had set aside and went to the Xerox machine. The grind of the copier was the only sound in the office, except for Bea’s nasally voice sending the lone swing-shift cruiser to an accident. A Chevy had hit a deer.
A phone rang, and Mike grabbed it. Joe listened as she slapped another paper on the glass. Mike was talking to Sheriff Leach, and she heard Mike tell him that he would deliver the message.
“What message?” she asked when Mike hung up.
“Sheriff wants all of us here tomorrow at ten for a powwow on the bones,” he said.
“Did he say if he called in the state investigators?”
“Nope, but he will. What the hell are we going to do? None of us has ever handled anything like this before.”
“I thought Mack had.”
“Mack’s idea of himself and his experience is highly inflated,” Mike said. “He’s nothing but a small-town cop with big-city dreams that have passed him by.”
“Nothing wrong with dreams, Mike. You can’t live without them.”
“Yeah, but how long do you hang on to one you’re never going to have? At some point, you just got to decide that isn’t what life had in store for you and move on.”
Joe watched him as he finished off the Coke and tossed the can into the trash. She didn’t know a lot about Mike Villella, but she knew he had lived in the Leelanau Peninsula his whole life, had two children, a boy seven and a girl eleven, and a wife he called twice a day. Joe could do the math and figure he had married at eighteen.
She went back to her desk, sliding the bulletins back onto the ring binder. Mike was watching her as she stuck the copies in a manila folder.
“What you gonna do with those?” he asked.
“Not sure yet,” she said.
He grunted and headed to the door. “Well, I’m out of here. See you at the powwow,” he said.
Joe pulled open a desk drawer and started to drop the folder in. But then she closed the drawer. She would take the bulletins home, although she wasn’t sure why. Maybe to study them, maybe because she just wanted to keep them close. She gathered up her hat and keys and went outside.
Out in the parking lot, she paused, turning toward the lake. It was still warm, and the sky was a shimmering red curtain behind the black shanties of Fishtown. A gull screamed and disappeared.
She was remembering what she had said to Mike about dreams, but she was thinking about her father now. Thinking about the smoky smell that he carried home with him every night on his fireman’s uniform. Thinking about his warmth when she nestled into the crook of his arm and his voice when he read from Charlotte’s Web. Thinking about the little poem he used to tell her at night: Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.
She brushed her hair back from her face and put on her hat, pulling it snugly down over her ponytail. The fingers of her right hand found the top edge of her holster, and she fingered the leather and the metal beneath it.
A shiver snaked up her spine and she knew immediately what it was. She had been here seven months now, and the most pulse-quickening thing she had done was take a slap to the head as she helped Mike push an unruly drunk into the back of the car.
All those weeks in the academy, she had dreamed of putting on a uniform. But never—not once in her wildest dreams—did she think she would be working a possible homicide. She felt charged by all this, the sight of the yellow tape, the chatter of the radios, the faces of those forgotten girls in the bulletins, and that pelvic bone, its stark whiteness standing out against the dark leaves.
A stab of guilt pierced her, and she looked at the manila folder in her hand.
Was this what it felt like to be a cop? To feel so alive because someone was dead?
3
It was dark by the time she pulled into the gravel drive. She gathered up the folder of bulletins and got out of the Jeep. Propping open the screen door with her hip, she fumbled for her house key in the dark. A scratching sound behind the wooden front door, then a low whine.
“Okay, okay, Chips, I’m coming,” she said.
Before she could get the door completely open, a snout thrust through and the rest of the big yellow mutt emerged. The dog’s front legs came up on her thighs as his long, skinny tail swung like a racing metronome.
“What’s the matter, kiddo? You afraid of the dark?” Joe said, scratching the dog’s ears.
She hit the light switch at the left of the door. She had started toward the table when her shoe hit something soft, and she skidded. She looked down.
Shit.
She held up her foot and let out a sigh. Then she saw Chips sitting there, staring at her balefully.
“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s my fault for being late.”
She opened the screen door, and Chips ran outside. She hopped into the kitchen, tossed the folder on the counter, and grabbed some paper towels. Once she had cleaned her shoe and the floor, she stood up, wiping her sweaty forehead and looking around the cottage.
The cottage had been closed up all day, and it was hot and stuffy. But it was neat and clean, as usual. The plaid throw was folded over the arm of the sofa, the breakfast mugs were left clean in the sink drainer, and that morning’s Echo Bay Banner was already rolled into a tight bundle for the winter kindling pile.
Joe stared at the newspaper in consternation. The log newspaper roller was Brad’s new toy. He had bought the gadget, which looked like a big pasta maker, out of a catalogue, and every morning, he fed the Banner into the roller and added the paper log to the pile by the sink. Problem was, he never seemed to remember that she liked to read the paper at night when she got home.
A scratching at the door. She went to let Chips back in. He followed her into the kitchen, waiting patiently while she dumped a glob of Alpo into his bowl and refreshed his water.
Then she went around the cottage, throwing open the windows to let in the sultry night air. After changing into an old T-shirt and running shorts, she got an icy Stroh’s from the refrigerator. She leaned against the counter taking a long drink as she watched Chips lick the empty bowl in the hopeful way that only an ex-stray could. Her eyes drifted to the folder of missing persons bulletins. She opened it and looked at the face of the first girl. Dark hair. Lovely eyes. Sixteen years old.
She turned away from it and took her beer out to the screened-in porch, settling into the wicker lounge. The darkness enveloped her, endless and deep, glittering with a million pinpricks of light. The sky was different up here that way. No city lights to mask the beauty of the stars. No smog to sour the night air. Their rented cottage was about a mile outside town in a stand of pines, and while Joe could sometimes—when the wind was just right—smell the lake, she couldn’t see it.
She thought about her mother suddenly, and something she had once told her.
You’re an Aquarius, Joe, you should live near water.
Ma, the only water in Cleveland is the Cuyahoga River, and that is more solid than liquid.
Don’t get smart. I’m just telling you what your chart says.
The phone rang. She didn’t want to get up, but it might be Brad. She was eager to tell him about the bones. She went in to grab the receiver.
“I called earlier. Where were you?”
“Ma! I was just thinking about you.”
“I know. That’s why I called. I know when my daughter needs me. I can feel it. Don’t tell me I can’t.”
Joe’s smile lingered. In addition to doing astrology charts, Florence Frye claimed to have ESP. But only with her daughter, she would always add whenever someone gave her the usual look.
“I’m fine,” Joe said, as a way of short-circuiting her mother’s inquiries into her personal life.
“Did I say anything?”
“Don’t start.” Joe took a swig of the beer. Her mother wasn’t crazy about Brad, said he wasn’t “right” for her, because she had done their charts and said their moons were squared. Joe decided to divert the subject.
“Have you heard from Dennis lately?” she asked.
“Well, you know your brother,” Florence said. “Seeing the world on a wing and a prayer. Last I heard, he was working the pipeline in the Yukon or somewhere.”
Joe smiled. She missed her older brother.
“But I didn’t call to talk about him,” Florence said.
Joe waited, hearing some small catch in her mother’s voice.
“The divorce is final,” Florence finally said.
“Oh, Ma…”
“It’s okay. I’m okay. He was a horse’s ass. I’m better off without him.”
Gus Grandle had been Florence Frye’s fifth husband. Joe didn’t know Gus well, because Florence had married him while Joe was away at Northern. Joe met him at the wedding in Cleveland and once more at Christmas. He was a gregarious, red-faced truck driver whom Joe remembered as having a too-loud laugh and a penchant for Polack jokes. But the guy doted on Florence, took her to Vegas, bought her a pair of rhinestone earrings the size of ice cubes, and seemed to make her happy. For three years at least.
“I thought you and Gus were trying to work things out,” Joe said.
Joe could feel her mother’s shrug through the phone. “The magic wore off. He gave me snow tires for my birthday.”
Joe laughed. She could hear her mother lighting up one of her Salems. In the long pause Joe could read that her mother was taking this harder than she was letting on. And she knew that Gus wasn’t the man foremost in her mother’s mind tonight.
“I was thinking about Daddy today,” Joe said quietly.
Her mother was silent for a moment. “Yeah, me, too.” More silence. “God, I miss him.”
“Me, too, Ma.”
Joe cradled the phone close, waiting. She could hear the chit-chit-chit of her mother’s parakeet in the background. Finally, Joe heard the sharp intake of smoky breath as her mother came back from her memories.
“So!” Florence said, coughing. “What’s new in your life? Tell me something to get my mind off things. Make it up if you have to.”
Joe laughed softly. “We’ve got a good case,” she said, putting her legs up on a table. She went on to tell her mother about the bones.
“Well, you’ve got to find out who she was.”
“Yeah, Ma, I know that.
“I’m not talking about just IDing her. I’m talking about finding out who she really was. You got anything other than bones?”
Joe hesitated. She thought about mentioning the piece of silver they had found but a part of her didn’t want to go into this, but a different part of her knew that even when her mother was pressing like this, she could be helpful. Florence Frye had been a cop once, after all. Sometimes Joe had trouble remembering that. Her mother…a policewoman on the Cleveland force, one of the first, back in the late fifties. Not a commissioned officer, of course. Her mother had been assigned to the jail as a matron and later worked the parking-meter circuit, but she prided herself on the fact that she had a badge. Every time Joe got to thinking how hard she herself had it back in the academy, or even how much crap she had to take from guys like Mack, all she had to do was imagine how much tougher it had been for Officer Florence Frye.
“Joe?”
“Yeah, Ma, I’m here.”
“There’s always something you can use. You just gotta find it. Find it, and you will find this girl.”
Joe almost said it, almost said, You were a jail matron, Ma, not an investigator. Sometimes it was just too hard to hear the echo of dead dreams in her mother’s voice. Sometimes it was just too hard being the depository for those same dreams.
She took a swig of beer. “I’ll try,” she said softly.
“You can get to know a victim from something as small as a button,” Florence went on, her smoke-rasped voice taking on an edge of excitement. “A button can lead to a blouse and a blouse to a store and to a credit-card receipt.”
“They’ve got a search team out there. Maybe they’ll find something.”
There was a long pause on Florence’s end. “They’re not letting you in on this, are they?” she said.
Joe waited too long to answer, and Florence’s sigh filled the dead space. “Look, sweetheart, now that the papers are signed and all, I don’t have much on my plate,” she said. “How about if I come up for a visit?”
Joe was surprised to feel a slight tightening in her throat. She hadn’t seen her mother in months. She missed her.
“I’d like that, Ma. When could you come?”
“Hell, I’ll throw a suitcase in the Pontiac, get Audrey next door to come in and feed the bird. I can be there in two days.”
Joe smiled. “Pack light. We’re having a warm fall.”
They said their goodbyes, and Joe hung up the phone. She took her beer back out to the porch, switching on a small table lamp to break up the darkness. She pushed Chips aside to make room on the lounge and picked up the Echo Bay Banner.
