08-A Thousand Bones, page 8
A bell shrieked. Doors banged open, and suddenly the hallways filled with noise and laughter. The principal cocked his head toward the back. “Come into my office so we can hear each other.”
Joe took the chair he offered after he closed the door on the noise and the stares of the woman outside.
“Did Georgia give you a hard time?” he asked, sitting down behind his desk.
“I’m used to it. People generally don’t like talking to police.”
“She’s protective, of me and the school.” He smiled. “Leelanau County. That’s up near Traverse City, right?”
“Yes, sir.” Maybe it was that great shock of white hair, but something about Mr. Garrett made her feel as if she were a high school kid again.
“I have a hunting cabin up by Kalkaska. Don’t get up there as much as I like.” His blue eyes drifted but came back to her. “Now, you’re asking about a charm?”
Joe slid the photograph across the desk. “Yes, sir. It might be from your school. It could be connected to a missing girl.”
He peered at the photo and nodded. “Yes, that’s ours. The pep club thought they could raise money selling them. But no one wanted them. It took us years to get rid of them all.”
“Can you remember what year you started selling the charms?”
He shook his head. “They were just one of many things the pep club sold over the years.” He handed the picture back to Joe. “You said this is about a missing girl?”
“Actually, we are trying to identify some remains,” Joe said. “This charm was on a bracelet found with the bones.”
Garrett’s affable expression clouded. “Good Lord.”
“Can you recall any students going missing over the last decade or so?” she asked.
He thought for a moment, then shook his head slowly.
“Are you sure?” Joe asked. “Someone who maybe didn’t come back after summer?”
“That happens all the time,” Garrett said. “People move. We don’t track them down.”
Joe stifled a sigh of disappointment. “Would it be possible for me to talk to some of your teachers?”
“Well, only the ones on break right now. Most of them are in the teachers’ lounge. I’ll take you there.”
Garrett led her to a room that smelled of cigarettes and tuna fish. Six teachers sat at a table drinking coffee. Two others were over in a corner going over lesson plans. Everyone looked up as Garrett led Joe in, introduced her, and explained what she was looking for. Joe was able to rule out three of the teachers immediately because they had been hired that fall.
Of the remaining ones, the men just shrugged and shook their heads when Joe asked about the charm bracelet. But when Joe took out the photograph of the full bracelet, a woman came forward.
“Can I see it?” she asked. Her voice was nasally from a cold. She was holding a roll of toilet paper and stuck it under her arm to take the photo.
She studied the picture and looked back up at Joe. “I had a girl in one of my English classes who wore a bracelet like this,” she said. “I remember it because she jangled it constantly. It used to drive me crazy, so I made her take it off whenever she came into my class. She gave me a lot of lip about it.”
“Do you remember her name?” Joe asked.
She handed the photo back. “God, that was years ago. I only remember her because of the bracelet. She wore a lot of jewelry and makeup and always dressed kind of wild, you know, tight skirts and leather.”
“Can you remember anything else about her? Did she graduate?” Joe pressed.
The teacher shook her head in mild disgust. “Dropped out, more likely. She was the kind who hated school and couldn’t wait to get out of here. You know how kids are. They think the suburbs are a dead-end kind of place.”
“Her name,” Joe pressed.
The teacher tore off a wad of toilet paper and blew her nose. “I only remember that she went by a nickname, and it was a boy’s name. You know, like Mickey or Sammy or Freddie.”
Joe pulled out her notebook. “Could I have your name? In case I need to get back in touch.”
“Sure. Ellen Brody.” She sniffled. “Sorry I can’t be more help, but the girl didn’t make a big impression. Some kids are more blurry than others, you know?”
Joe thanked her and Mr. Garrett and left, heading back out the front door.
The sun had come out, but there was a bite to the air now, signaling the end of the long summer. As she walked to the cruiser, she was looking at the small tract houses across the street, thinking about some nameless girl who wanted to break free of the monotony of suburbs, small minds, and straight sidewalks that led to nowhere.
I don’t get it, Joe. Why the Upper Peninsula in Michigan? It’s so far away. Why there?
Because it’s not here, Ma.
Joe got into the cruiser and started the engine. But she just sat there, still staring at the little brick houses. There was one house that was different. It was an old stone place that had probably once been surrounded by apple orchards before the land had been cut up into tiny parcels and paved over. It had been a pretty house once, but now it just looked imprisoned by the bland houses around it.
Dead end…
She thought about Leach and his admonition that if she found nothing in Inkster, she had to let the bracelet lead go. She had linked the charm to this place, but there was still nothing to link it to the bones. She was chasing leads that went nowhere, being as stubborn about the unknown owner of the bracelet as Mack was about Annabelle Chapel.
She glanced back at the school. Why couldn’t she just let this go?
10
Joe closed her eyes and rubbed her stiff neck. For the last hour, she had been closeted in the evidence room, a ten-by-ten cubbyhole that had served as the men’s restroom back in the station’s days as a library. There was no room for a chair, so she was perched on the lid of an old toilet, clipboard in her lap.
After her return from Inkster yesterday, Leach had told her to put the bracelet aside. There was nothing to do now but go back to the assignment Mack had given her—logging in the leftover junk from the search.
Joe picked a broken Bic pen out of the box. She tagged it, numbered it, dated it, and entered it on the log.
She thought back to the two suits she had dealt with at the Inkster PD. They had never moved their asses off their desks even to look in a drawer. Just spent the five minutes exchanging glances. On her way out, one of them had suggested that the next time she wanted help with an investigation, she should have her sheriff call.
One rubber band. Date. Place. Time.
One pair of men’s wire-rimmed glasses.
“Hey.”
She looked up. Mike stood at the door. His tie was stuffed in his pants pocket. “Sheriff said he let you go down to Inkster yesterday.”
“Yeah,” Joe said, going back to her logging.
“You find out anything?” Mike asked.
“Nothing important.”
Mike slid down the doorjamb, sitting on his heels, his green notebook in his lap. He didn’t offer to help, so Joe picked up the next item.
One half-filled bottle of sloe gin.
“So tell me about it,” Mike said.
Joe knew he didn’t care, but she wanted to tell someone. “I found a teacher who remembered a girl who had a charm bracelet like the one we found.”
“No name?”
“Nothing that helps.”
“Did you talk to the Inkster PD?”
“Oh, yeah. They were a big help.”
“Well, maybe it’s time to let Mack finish this up.”
“Our victim is not Annabelle Chapel,” Joe said.
Mike gave her a small smile and stretched to his feet. “I’m hungry,” he said. “Let’s go to lunch.”
She glanced at the pile of junk on the floor and started to shake her head but then decided she needed a break, if nothing else to ease her bad mood. Her disappointment over the trip to Inkster had spilled over last night with Brad. They had argued about something so stupid she couldn’t even remember now what it was.
“Come on,” Mike pressed. “I’ll buy.”
“Talked me into it,” she said. She closed the door and locked it, wondering why she bothered. Except for the box of junk from the woods, the shelves were nearly bare.
They checked out with Augie and stepped outside. It was sunny, the air alive with eddies of leaves. At the Cove bar in Fishtown, they took a table on the weather-worn deck that overlooked the water. It felt good to be outside after the confinement of the evidence room. Joe turned her face to the sun, but her eyes were drawn to a two-story wood shanty on the other side of the canal. It was bleached gray by the harsh winds of countless winters and festooned with faded fishnetting, bruised white lifesavers, and Christmas lights. The deck was cluttered with junk—pots of geraniums, a flamingo lawn ornament, and a huge rusted deep-sea diver’s helmet.
There was a man sitting on the deck, soaking up the sunshine. He had a Buddha belly and two tufts of gray hair—one on his head and one on his chest. There was a pink plastic cup in his hand, a metal milk crate under his feet, and a smile on his face.
Mike saw her looking. “That’s Pete,” he said. “He’s rich.”
“Rich from what?”
“No one knows. He spends every day out there. Every morning, he climbs down that ladder, swims with his little poodle, and then climbs back out and goes right back to his chair. What a life.”
Joe turned away from Pete and settled into her chair, wondering how much the shanties were, or if they were even for sale. Maybe people rented them. But then she tried to picture Brad lounging with a metal crate under his feet. It didn’t sit well.
The waitress appeared. She set a Coke in front of Joe and a Pabst in front of Mike. Joe waited until she had taken their sandwich order and left before speaking.
“Mike, you’re on duty,” she said, nodding to the beer.
He took a drink. “It’s one beer, Joe. I don’t get drunk on one beer.”
“That’s not the point. People don’t need to see the person they might need to defend them later drinking at lunch.”
“Like someone’s going to need us to defend them here.”
Joe looked away, not wanting to get into an argument. There was a trio of over-the-hill blondes a few tables away, and she could tell by the tilt of their heads that they had already heard part of the conversation.
Mike leaned across the table. “Joe, I have never pulled my gun. I’ve only been in two or three tussles. This is not Detroit. Shit, it isn’t even Traverse City.”
“Things can happen, even here,” she said softly, “and you need to know you could defend someone if you had to.”
His smile vanished.
“Don’t you ever think about it?” she asked.
“Think about what?”
“How you would handle yourself in a life-or-death situation,” she said. “If you could pull the trigger, especially in defense of someone else.”
“No,” he said, taking a drink.
She let him see her shock.
“I don’t think about it,” he said, “because I know I could do it. I got the same training for the same number of weeks you did.”
“It’s more than training,” she said. “It’s something inside you. I don’t believe everyone could pull a trigger. Not even police officers.”
“Then maybe they shouldn’t be cops.”
He settled back in his chair, stiffly, looking out at the water. She thought about letting this go, but she couldn’t. Still, she didn’t want to rag on him, either, not about his cop masculinity, as she had come to think of male officers’ peculiar brand of machismo.
“You know,” she said, “there was this sign I saw up in the academy that I never forgot. It’s a quote from Hemingway. It goes, ‘There is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else.’”
“So what, now you’re saying that because I’ve never had to use my gun, I’m a lousy cop?”
“I don’t think you’re a lousy cop, Mike,” she said with a sigh. “I think you’re a careless one, and I think that one day that carelessness is going to get you hurt.”
He finished his beer in three long swallows, then set the can on the table, silent. Their sandwiches appeared. Mike ordered a 7 Up.
“I don’t hunt, Joe, never liked it,” he said, taking the lettuce off the ham slices. “I don’t see much point in killing something that hasn’t done anything to you. But my dad was a hunter, so I understand the mentality.”
The three blondes broke up their party and waddled off the deck. When Joe looked back at Mike, he was holding out his green notebook.
“Here,” he said.
“What?”
“I want you to see something.”
She took the notebook. The papers were filled with handwritten entries, all done in black ink. The page he had folded over for her was titled “Indian Summer.”
In the heat of Indian summer, I sit quiet in still hot air.
My child’s eye watches my father as he becomes another man
I do not know.
A man who touches his bullets the way other men fondle gold,
A man who holds his rifle the way other men hold a son,
A man who draws his strength from the sharpness of the pines
And the lingering scent of an animal on the run.
In the heat of Indian summer, I am alone within the woods.
My child’s mind wonders what it is my father seeks,
I do not know.
I wonder if he fears the strength of the animals he stalks,
I wonder what he feels as he stands and watches them die,
I wonder if he takes their breath and keeps it as his own,
And I wonder if he is the animal, and if he is, what am I?
In the heat of Indian summer, I sit with a rifle in my arms.
My man’s eye watches a white feather scamper through the trees.
I do not shoot.
She closed the book and pushed it back across the table.
“You didn’t laugh,” he said.
“Why would I?” she asked.
Mike was silent for a moment. “It’s bad, isn’t it?”
“No, it’s not.” She couldn’t think of anything else to say because she was so shocked that the man sitting across from her even knew what poetry was.
“I write essays, too,” Mike said. “But mostly just thoughts. I have another notebook with the beginnings of a short story.”
She was still staring at him.
“I started them when I was riding alone, back five or six years ago,” he said. “I have, like, twenty notebooks hidden in the garage.”
“Hidden? Mindy doesn’t know you do this?”
He had taken a bite of his sandwich, and he almost choked. “Hell, no,” he said.
Joe watched him. He was wiping mayonnaise off his lip, his cheeks pink. She pulled the photographs of the charms from her pants pocket. She kept them with her now all the time, afraid Mack would dump them in the nearest trash can if he got the chance. She pushed her plate aside and spread them in front of Mike.
“I’ve seen the bracelet, Joe,” he said.
“Yes, but now I want you to look again,” she said. “Tell me what you think they mean.”
“Mean? What do you mean ‘mean’?”
“Mike, you see things. Maybe more than you want to admit. So what do you see in these charms?”
He stared at the photos for a moment. “Well, you know they’re like souvenirs, right?”
“Souvenirs?”
He pointed to the first one. “This windmill is probably from Holland.”
“Holland?”
“It’s a town down by Grand Rapids. We took the kids there once. They have a lot of tulips with all this Dutch stuff.”
Mike sifted through the other shots. “These are all Michigan tourist places. The Christmas tree is from Frankenmuth, and the carriage is from Mackinac Island. The train is probably Greenfield Village, that museum down near Detroit. The teddy bear, maybe Sleeping Bear Dunes?”
Joe could only stare blankly. “What about the cross?” she asked.
“That’s probably the Cross in the Woods,” he said.
“Where is that?”
“Indian River, not far from here,” he said. “It’s this outdoor Catholic shrine with this giant cross and a seven-ton bronze Jesus.”
“How do you know all that?”
“Been there too many times to count,” he said. “My dad took me to the woods to hunt, my mom took me to the woods to pray. It’s the Italian Catholic thing.”
Joe turned the photos over and wrote the names of the places on the backs.
Mike was wiping his hands on the paper napkin. “I think you’re right about Annabelle Chapel,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“This bracelet didn’t belong to some girl from Chicago,” Mike said. “Coming up north is a Michigan thing. It’s a summer ritual. Dad gets a week off from Ford Motor, and the family goes up north to rent a cabin somewhere. They pay to catch fish in the trout ponds, climb the dunes. By the time they’re fifteen, they’ve seen it all.”
“So you think she was definitely from downstate?”
“Well, no one from up here would collect charms from places we see all the time.”
She started to gather up the pictures, then stopped. “What kind of girl do you think would collect these?”
“You’re the female here,” he said.
“You’re the poet,” she said.
He blushed again, but his eyes drifted back to the photos. Then he drew the one of the carriage to him. “Okay, on Mackinac Island, they have a dozen possible symbols—bicycles, cannons from the fort, ferries, the lighthouse, probably even little fudge boxes. But she chose a horse and carriage. Kind of a romantic charm, right?”
