Disembodied Bones, page 11
“You want me to meet your family?” he said quietly.
“Sure. Why wouldn’t I?” Leonie’s response was hurried and the words didn’t ring quite true in her mind.
“Anyway,” he breathed out slowly, realizing it was an appropriate time to change the subject. “You think we can go out tonight? I know I’m a little late in asking and I probably shouldn’t presume you’re free, seeing as how beautifully you’re attired right now, and how many men probably trip over themselves getting to your door.”
“Ha-ha,” Leonie said saccharinely. “That’s not going to get you any sugar.” She waved her hands around to indicate the dusty, dank work room filled to capacity with various antiques and collectables. “It goes with the work. And I can take a shower.”
There was another brief flash of white teeth in his face and then Elan said, “I went by your cottage earlier, and there was a man there.”
“You know I work on Saturdays,” she said after a moment.
“So do I. I thought I could catch you before you came down here. I was on my way to Dallas, and well, I missed you. But this guy looked shady.”
“No.” Leonie shrugged a little. “Maybe he wanted to break in? He can have my black and white TV and he’s welcome to the broken VCR. He can’t have my cat, however.”
“An alarm system would take care of that,” said Elan, folding his arms over his chest.
Leonie went back to oiling the highboy. “An alarm system wouldn’t be authentic to a 1909 cottage.”
Elan frowned. “We’ve had this discussion before.”
“And you’re going to lose again,” Leonie said decisively.
“Fine.” The neutrality of his tone slipped a little and Leonie detected something odd about it. She couldn’t tell what it was but it made her uncomfortable. That was funny because nothing about Elan seemed to be uncomfortable. He was always aware of her feelings, considerate, and conscientious to the point of being almost too selfless. Dacey said it was because he loved her. Leonie privately thought it was something else. Elan waited a moment and added, “Dinner, then?”
“Eight?”
“Pick you up at your cottage, then,” he said with a note of arrogance and leaned over to brush her cheek gently with his lips. The flesh there burned with feeling as if his lips had temporarily branded her skin. She resisted the impulse to touch the spot.
Leonie stood still for a moment and then turned to smile at him. The smile wavered a little. “I wasn’t trying to pry about your mother.”
“I know,” he answered politely. “You don’t like to talk about your mother, either.”
“I don’t, I suppose. Mothers,” she said with a little wave of the oil-soaked rag. “What are you going to do with them?”
Elan’s eyes glittered at her. Then he laughed. “God, I don’t know.” He paused and then said, “Looking forward to tonight, then.”
He was turning to leave when Dacey hurried inside the backroom and asked in a rush, “Have either of you seen Olga?”
Leonie glanced around. She had been caught up in finishing up the Pennsylvania Dutch chest and then had immediately started in on the highboy. A herd of rampaging elephants could have trampled past her and she probably wouldn’t have noticed. “No. She’s not back?”
Elan said, “I just got here.”
Dacey ran a nervous hand through her black hair. “She’s probably asking a workman at the courthouse if she can climb the scaffolding or something equally deadly. I’ll run outside and look for her again.”
Elan spared Leonie a serious glance. “Do you want us to help?” he asked her politely. “We can find her more quickly.”
Dacey’s mouth opened. There was that impulse to deny that anything was wrong, that little girls like Olga did things like this all the time. Olga didn’t have a good sense of time and she often came in minutes later than she should and Dacey was just as prone to forgetting the time. She had looked up at the old grandfather clock in the main foyer and discovered that Olga was not only a few minutes later but almost a half-hour later than she should be. When Dacey had circled the block she couldn’t find her daughter and she hoped that Olga had stolen into the Gingerbread House without anyone being the wiser. After all, Erica and Tinie didn’t know that Olga was supposed to be inside or out and were both busy with customers. But when Dacey had returned and asked the two women in front about Olga, both had shaken their heads. Just the same way that Elan and Leonie were shaking theirs. No one had seen Olga since she had walked out the front door of the store.
It would be easy for Dacey to say something like, “It’ll be all right. Olga will show up in a minute. She’ll show up with ice cream on her face and some excuse about how she’d gone into the old pharmacy and Mr. Smith had given her a float.” It would be easy for Dacey to deny that anything could possibly be wrong. But something was wrong. “Yes, I want you to help me,” she answered Elan and there was a quiver in her voice that made Leonie tremble.
•
Leonie walked around the south side of the city block on which the antique store was situated. There were a total of four brick commercial buildings that dated from as early as 1895 and as late as 1915. Later builders had been careful to maintain similar styles as the older buildings and replicated decorative metal cornices and graceful arched windows that allowed an abundance of natural light to filter into the interior of the stores. The sidewalks were narrow affairs with cracks and breaks that demonstrated how well the sifting clay soil below soaked up water and then dried out. It wasn’t a large block but it had a significant number of craft and antique related stores. Leonie stuck her head into each door and asked if they had seen Olga. Most of the owners belonged to the Buffalo Creek Downtown Merchants Association and knew each other. They also knew Olga Rojas and she wasn’t in any of the stores. Furthermore, and more troubling, none of them had seen her that day.
When Leonie rounded the northeast corner of the block she found Dacey and Elan speaking with the Pegram County Sheriff. Scott Haskell towered over the diminutive Dacey with an imposing six feet five inches of muscle, but it was his orange red hair and a mist of freckles across his face that usually caught people’s attention. He had pulled his Stetson off his head and held it under one arm as he looked down at Dacey. In his forties, he was considered a decent law enforcement officer and had been reelected to his post by a high percentage the previous November.
Leonie stopped in her tracks and stared at the three of them. Dacey must have flagged Scott down in the street as he’d passed. His patrol car was parked haphazardly in a space next to the curb, blocking three spots in front of the store. She was gesturing with her arms while Elan looked over Dacey’s shoulder at Scott, looking bizarrely discordant with his circumspect suit and professional grooming. A worried Erica Jones came out of the Gingerbread House, pausing beside Elan to listen to Dacey’s urgent appeal to Scott.
Then Dacey ran nervous fingers through her black hair, craning her neck about, just in case Olga would magically appear. She spotted Leonie and called jarringly, “Lee, you find her?”
Scott’s impenetrable gaze followed Dacey’s gaze, unerringly discovering Leonie in his line of sight. She resisted the impulse to turn around and go the other way as if she hadn’t heard her partner call for her. Instead she shook her head and started forward again. “I checked all the stores on our block. No one’s seen her. But maybe she could have gotten into their stores without someone seeing so we can go-” She had almost reached the four people standing on the sidewalk when Scott Haskell harshly interrupted her.
“I’ll do that.” His voice was like crushed ice as he stared at Leonie. She already knew what his problem was. He was a skeptical cop. He knew about her past. He knew and he disapproved, not hesitating to share that information with her. Not only did he disapprove but he felt as if she were some kind of elaborate swindler. He’d taken a few grating minutes when she’d first opened the store with Dacey to warn her privately that he wouldn’t put up with that kind of nonsense in his county. There would be no fortune telling. No interpretation of the future in a goat’s entrails. No crystal ball gazing. No gobbledygook from someone like her. If she wanted to sell antiques, fine then, but he’d be keeping one of his astute brown eyes on her. And Scott’s final words of his warning haunted Leonie, “And by God, nothing like you did with that Harkenrider kid.”
Leonie hadn’t known exactly what to say to Scott. He stared down his nose at her as if she were some kind of disease that threatened to endanger every last soul in the county, as if she were contagion itself, Typhoid Mary on the prowl to infect new prospects with her malady. The last words he’d spoken to her slithered through her consciousness like the disease he thought she was, tainting every brain cell, every synapse, axon, and dendrite. She hadn’t thought of Jay Harkenrider and his mother, Alexa, for nearly three years. It was enough to make her stop again in her tracks a full ten feet away from the other four people.
Dacey had looked back at Scott expectantly. Scott’s searing gaze left Leonie and she wavered. Her head was starting to ache. Specifically, the scar from the bullet that had separated the skin of her face was on fire. It burned back into her brain and wove a path to the back of her eyes. If she wasn’t standing so close to these people she would have thrown her hands up to her head and cried out with the sudden intensity of the pain. It was as if something untouchable and invisible was forcing its way to the surface of her consciousness, using brute strength to rip at her soft interior organs to make its way.
There were days like these. Twenty years hadn’t made much of a difference. Leonie’s mind had been opened by the Pennsylvania Dutch chest. Someone had cried over that chest. Someone had felt its absence as if another were tearing their pulsating hearts of out of their living bodies. And Leonie had been able to touch upon it. She couldn’t explain the connections that happened. They didn’t happen frequently, but only occasionally and enough to make her go into a dark room with a cold compress in an attempt to forget what was happening inside her brain. But today, for the first time in months, her mind was open, and Dacey was missing Olga. Dacey had been merely concerned at first, but now fear was running rampant through her veins, an unbridled course of emotion that leached out to Leonie.
It was as if there was an invisible stream of hidden light that linked the pair. Leonie had tried to explain the process before to Dacey, but had failed. The key was that something had to be missed. If it wasn’t truly missed then she couldn’t bond to the one who professed missing something. But there was more than that to it. It didn’t work all the time. And when her gift was working, when she wasn’t thinking of an angry Monroe Whitechapel thundering at her with the weapon in his hand, it didn’t always work with certain individuals. Leonie couldn’t call it on demand. The family deemed that she had been damaged by the event with Whitechapel and worse she had threatened the safety of the family members by approaching the police. She had been ostracized because in a world of people who were so patently different than those in the greater universe, she was just as different from them.
But Dacey was open to Leonie. She was a beloved friend, someone who took Leonie’s strange traits in stride, neither judging nor condemning her for her disparities. “Olga’s missing,” Leonie muttered hoarsely. She couldn’t prevent her hands from reaching up to cradle her aching head. Her fingers pressed hard into her flesh trying to push the pain away.
She didn’t see Dacey’s head spin toward her and Scott Haskell growl, “Dammit, Leonie, I told you none of that crap, and not now, for Christ’s sake.”
Elan and Erica both stared at Leonie with the fixed fascination of people staring at a raging house fire with people screaming from within, their helplessness conveyed to the outside world with petrifying screams that made the heart clench in powerless shock. It was horrifying but they couldn’t look away.
Leonie’s knees crumpled and she fell to the hot pavement. She didn’t even let go of her head, but took the fall on both knees, a piece of concrete skittered away from her. The July sun was blazing down upon them and she felt as if she were trapped inside a freezer. The ripping pain inside her head intensified, a knife tip thrusting into her flesh between her eyes. “Missing,” she moaned.
“Lee,” said Dacey appalled. She took a faltering step closer. “Lee, honey, do you…know where Olga is?”
Scott gently grasped Dacey’s shoulder with an iron grip. “Jesus Christ, Dacey. How could she know where Olga is? That mental hogwash is pure-D bull!”
Dacey refused to look away from Leonie as her slight body crumpled on the sidewalk, long black hair spilling over her face like an ebony waterfall of silk. She was bent over so far that Dacey feared the younger woman was going to spill over on her face without reaching out her hands to stop the impending collapse. Dacey tried to step forward but the large freckled hand on her shoulder held her in place. For a moment her eyes glided over the other people standing there. Erica had a hand over her shocked mouth and her eyes were set on Leonie’s figure. Even Elan was stunned into position, frozen in place, enthralled by her. Other people began to spill out of various stores, silent and staring, wondering what was happening.
When Leonie looked up at Dacey at last, the gold color of her eyes was almost completely concealed by huge black pupils. “I know where she is. She’s frightened but she’s alive and unhurt.”
Dacey groaned with the mental pain of it all. “How can you know, Leonie?” she demanded gutturally. “How can you possibly know?” She shook Scott’s hand off her shoulder and went to her partner.
A sad look consumed Leonie’s face. “I don’t know. I just know.”
-
It can be said:
To be gold is to be good;
To be stone is to be nothing;
To be glass is to be fragile;
To be cold is to be cruel.
Unmetaphored, what am I?
I am a heart.
Chapter Three
Saturday, July 20th
A lot of bark,
But no one notices.
A lot to bite,
And everyone cares.
I’m not a dog,
If anyone notices.
And there’s a lot to me,
But I don’t have hair.
I stand up straight,
If you’ve noticed me.
I’ve got lots of limbs,
If anyone cares.
I can give you shade,
If you’ve noticed it.
And I do even more,
I give you air.
What am I?
“You can’t honestly believe that she knows where your daughter is?” Scott Haskell barked, with all the sensitivity of a rabid dog. “She’s a fake. If you could have seen what that Harkenrider woman had to go through because of her.” Words suddenly failed Scott and he resorted to a string of virulent curses that would have made a company of sailors blush.
Dacey took Leonie’s arm in a tight grip and stared down into her eyes. “Where is Olga?”
“Then she took Olga away,” Scott suddenly pronounced. “Leonie must have taken her, herself just to make herself look-”
“When?” Dacey roared, throwing her head back. “When she was in the backroom with the Dutch chest for the last forty minutes? When I asked her about fifteen minutes ago if she wanted a cold coke and she ignored me because she was so wrapped up in her work? When Elan came in a few minutes ago? Jesus, Scott, you think I’m stupid? You think I have some crazy person as a partner in the store? Leonie knows things. She’s always known things. I can’t always tell if she’s right, but she’s been right too many times to discount.”
Leonie stared at the sun and Elan approached silently to shade her face from the strong light. He said, “We should take this inside. It’s a hundred degrees in the shade.” He wrapped a gentle arm around Leonie’s shoulder and helped her up. “What about Olga, Leonie?”
Dacey let go with great reluctance and her voice when she spoke revealed the amount of fear inside. “Lee, honey. If you know then tell us. Don’t keep us hanging on a string.”
“The park,” Leonie whispered. “She’s at the park. The trees are as tall as the courthouse to her. Their bark is like a roadmap of deep crevices and the shadows are almost as cool as being inside. She’s all alone but…”
“But what?” Dacey shot the words out.
“Something’s wrong,” Leonie finished, her voice just a thread. “We have to hurry.”
“What park?” Scott snapped. “What park did you take her to?”
“Scott!” Dacey yelled. “Shut up! Just shut…up.”
“Trees. Lots of trees. Big trees,” Leonie said quietly. “Get me to a car. I’ll find it.”
Scott made a grunting noise. “Get into the patrol car, Leonie. You too, Dacey.”
“I’m going,” insisted Elan, holding onto Leonie’s shoulders.
“Fine.” Scott held the doors open and glared at Leonie. Then he glared at the people on the sidewalk who had come out to watch. “I’m still taking out an APB on Olga. We can have every patrolman in the county looking for her. We can have an Amber alert put out on her for the Dallas/Fort Worth area.” From his skeptical tone, Scott clearly didn’t believe a word that Leonie was saying and didn’t believe that she could lead them to Olga.
“What’s an Amber alert?” Elan asked, closing the door behind him. He and Leonie were sitting in the back. Dacey was turned halfway around in the front seat, staring through the cage at her partner as if she had never seen her before. Erica Jones stood frozen on the sidewalk while Scott issued rapid-fire instructions to her about Olga and the officers who would be arriving presently. Erica nodded in a stunned fashion and simply watched them.
Scott got into the driver’s seat just in time to hear Elan’s question. He held up a finger while he got on his radio set to call in the APB for Olga Rojas, pausing only to ask Dacey what the little girl had been wearing.
