Mack looked at the other rookie officer standing next to him. “Holt,” he said, “you were here first. Who dug it up?”

  Holt licked his lips. “I don’t know, sir. I just know the two kids and the dog were standing here when I showed up.”

  Leach grunted to a standing position. He was a burly man, with a halo of sparse white hair surrounding a florid face punctuated by a thick white mustache. Joe suspected he probably got whatever Santa Claus gigs there were in Echo Bay. He had that kind of gentle aura—until you got a good look at the keen gray-green eyes behind the wire-rimmed glasses. She had seen him angry only once, and those eyes had turned as dark as a storm-tossed Lake Michigan.

  Holt was getting that look from the sheriff now, and the rookie gave an embarrassed shrug. “I’ll go talk to the kids,” he said.

  “No,” Leach said. “You and Mack start looking for more bones.” He wiped his sweating face, leaving a smear of dirt near his nose. “Frye can deal with the kids.”

  Joe stood up, her eyes locked on Leach. What was this? One minute, he was bringing her in, and now he was banishing her to babysitting chores? She tried to catch Leach’s eye, but he had turned away.

  She took off her hat, wiped her wet hair off her forehead, and put the hat back on. The two boys were still waiting at the top of the ravine. She trudged up to them.

  “Okay,” she said, “which one of you found the bone?”

  They just looked up at her. Even the damn black Lab was staring at her. The cicadas were going at it again, their buzz and the awful heat bringing on a headache.

  The kids were still staring. She was twenty-two, unmarried. What did she know about kids? “What are you looking at?” she blurted out.

  The older boy looked at his friend, then back at Joe. “You really a policeman?”

  “Yeah, I’m really a policeman.”

  “I ain’t never seen a lady policeman before.”

  “Well, now you have.”

  Joe realized the kid was staring at her breasts. His eyes flicked to the gun at her hip and back to her chest. She couldn’t help it. She laughed. The kid’s face went crimson beneath his freckles.

  “Okay, okay,” she said. She pulled a small pad and pencil from her pocket. “Let’s get to work here. You two are witnesses, and I need your statements.”

  The boy’s eyes widened. “Witnesses? Wow.”

  Joe held back her smile. “Names?”

  “I’m R. C. Mellon. That’s R.C., like the cola,” the boy said.

  “And Mellon, like muskmelon brain,” the other boy chimed in.

  “Shut up, Frankie!”

  “Make me.”

  “All right,” Joe broke in. “Spell your names for me, and give me your addresses and phone numbers.” Joe wrote it all down. “And who found the bone?”

  “Farfel did,” R.C. said, patting the Lab’s big head. “We were playing, and Farfel ran off. I whistled for him, but he didn’t come. We finally saw him over that way.” He pointed north to a stand of tall pines. “But when we went after him, he ran off.”

  “Did he have the bone?”

  “Yeah. We chased him, and when we caught up with him, he was down there burying it.”

  The boy pointed to where Holt was stringing up more yellow crime tape. Joe surveyed the trees. She knew a little bit about this part of the woods, knew it covered a couple of miles, running all the way west to the shore of Lake Michigan. If the dog had found the bone somewhere other than where it lay now, the search for the rest of the bones or for a crime scene would be near impossible.

  She closed the notepad. “You guys have been a big help. Wait here, okay?”

  Sheriff Leach was standing back at his cruiser, talking on the radio, the coiled cord stretched through the open window. It sounded as if he were making arrangements for the coroner. The coroner would come from Traverse City, if he was in town. And any crime-scene guys would probably travel from Cadillac or even Lansing.

  She tapped Leach’s shoulder. He held up a finger as he gave directions to their location. She tapped him again. Leach finally told them to stand by for a moment and looked at her. “What is it, Joe?”

  “Where we found the bone is not a burial site.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The kids say the dog picked it up somewhere else.”

  “We know where?” he asked.

  Joe shook her head. Leach let out a sigh and rekeyed the microphone. “Yeah, Augie,” he said. “We’re going to need more than just the usual team. Give Michigan State a call, and see if they have any criminology students who want to participate in a search for some remains.”

  Leach signed off and leaned an elbow on the cruiser. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face.

  Joe glanced back at the kids. “I’ll see if the kids can show me where the dog found the bone.”

  The boys were sitting on a log, the Lab sprawled at their feet. When she asked them to show her where they were playing, the boys started off down the incline, the dog following. Joe trailed, kicking softly at the pine needles, her eyes scanning the ground. The kids led her into thicker trees and the shadows deepened as the leaves grew denser, blocking the sun.

  “This is it. This is the tree we were climbing on,” R.C. said suddenly.

  Joe glanced up. It was a majestic old beech tree, set down in a clearing of smaller trees. The canopy was so dense it almost felt like nightfall. Joe looked at the boys. “You’re sure this is the tree?”

  R.C. nodded and pointed. “Yup. I remember ’cause of those two weird branches that look like arms.”

  The dog was whining and pawing at the leaves. Joe pulled him away by the collar. “R.C., hold him back,” she said, handing the dog off.

  She knelt and brushed away the remaining leaves and needles. The ground seemed untouched underneath. She grabbed a stick and tried to work away some of the dirt. But she quickly realized that if there was a shallow grave here, a stick wasn’t going to get her to it. She stuck the stick in the dirt to mark the spot and looked back at the kids.

  Their faces were lined with dirty sweat. “I’m tired. Can we go now?” Frankie asked.

  “I’m sorry, you guys are probably hungry,” she said. “How about I buy you a hamburger on the way home?”

  Suddenly, the dog started growling, and Joe turned. He had something in his teeth. As she grabbed for his collar, he dropped what he had at her feet. It was another bone. Long, thin, whitish-brown, and perfectly clean. Maybe an arm or leg bone.

  Joe cupped her hands around her mouth and hollered, “Sheriff Leach! Over here!”

  She heard footsteps and the snapping of brush, and she glanced back to make sure the kids were still with her. R.C. was holding a third, smaller bone between his fingers, looking at her.

  “R.C., drop that, please,” she said.

  “It’s not yucky.”

  “I know, but please put it down.”

  The boy dropped it just as Leach, Mack, and Holt reached them. Leach immediately saw the large bone and motioned to Holt.

  “Holt, take the kids back to the cruiser and drive them home.”

  “I promised them a burger,” Joe called as Holt herded the kids and the dog back toward the road.

  When they were gone, Leach knelt by the two bones. Mack remained standing, his little eyes scooting over the leaves, past the bones, and finally back to Joe.

  Leach pulled himself up. “I’m guessing this is an arm bone and maybe a rib.”

  Joe was scanning the ground around the tree. Something odd and clumped caught her eye. She squatted down for it, then remembered she shouldn’t touch it. She carefully cleared away the dead leaves.

  “Sheriff,” she said.

  Both Mack and Leach came up behind her, bending to look over her shoulder.

  “What is that?” Leach asked.

  “I don’t know,” Joe said. “Maybe a piece of jewelry?”

  Mack picked up a stick and poked at the caked dirt, trying to break it loose from the object. A glint of tarnished silver appeared, and what looked like a tiny cross. He let out a grunt and tossed the stick aside.

  Then he turned and walked away. Joe watched him until he disappeared into the trees, then she picked up the stick Mack had left.

  Leach touched her shoulder. “Don’t touch it,” he said. “Let the tech get it.”

  She stuck the stick in the ground near the piece of silver, then dusted her hands on her trousers. Leach was staring out at the forest.

  “What are you thinking, sir?” she asked.

  “That this is going to be a helluva investigation,” he said.

  She knew their small department couldn’t handle a homicide and that Leach would ask the state for help. But she hoped he would let her be marginally involved.

  “Sir, is there anything I can start doing?” she asked.

  Leach smiled, hearing the eagerness in her voice. “Let’s relax here a little,” he said. “First, we have to let the experts take a look. It doesn’t look like she was buried, so her bones could be scattered for miles. We can keep searching for that, at least.”

  Joe’s eyes wandered out over the heavy woods, coming back finally to the tree. She hadn’t noticed it before, but now its strange beauty registered.

  The tree rose from a base of knotted roots covered by green moss. About ten feet from the ground, its wide, straight trunk split into two thick branches that curved straight upward. Like arms, just as R.C. had said.

  Like a woman’s arms, Joe thought. The tree looked like a kneeling woman, her emerald skirt spread out and her arms reaching upward as if awaiting rescue or salvation.

  2

  The sun was low in the sky by the time Joe started back to the station. The forensic crew had set up shop at the prayer tree, as Joe had come to call the spot where the dirt-caked jewelry had been unearthed. The coroner had offered his opinion that the three bones were probably from the same victim, and that they were, indeed, a rib, a humerus, and a female pelvis.

  Joe had caught the question again in Leach’s eyes: How did you know?

  Hell, she knew a lot about bones. Like, that there were two hundred and six of them in the human body. She could still name most of them, thanks to an instructor back at Northern Michigan University who had made the art majors memorize all the names. Joe had signed up for the instructor’s life drawing class after her roommate said it would be an easy way to see cute guys naked.

  Joe’s lips turned up in a smile as she drove.

  The models all turned out to be fat old women. She didn’t see a man fully naked until that January night after her nineteenth birthday when Jack Oberfell took her to the old lighthouse, gave her some Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill, spread his Tau Kappa Epsilon jacket on the hard floor, and efficiently claimed her virginity. The only thing she could clearly remember from the night was the sight of Jack’s shivering white body and his pecker retreating like a scared turtle in the cold.

  The road took a bend and changed from gravel to pavement as she turned out of the woods and onto M-22 South. Joe kept the cruiser going at a slow speed, savoring the time alone to think and drive. Her partner, Mike, didn’t like to relinquish the wheel of the cruiser, so she was glad he had stayed behind to man the station when the call about the bone came in.

  The bone…

  She couldn’t get the sight of it—so white against the black dirt—out of her head. And she couldn’t let go of the idea that there were other bones, the rest of that unknown girl, still out there somewhere.

  The cruiser rounded Cemetery Point. Soon the woods gave way, and the roadside was dotted with the neat bungalows and cottages that shepherded in Echo Bay.

  She wondered what the reaction in town would be once word of the bones got out. Echo Bay was just a village, really, wedged between the meandering waspwaisted Lake Leelanau to the east and the oceanlike stretch of Lake Michigan to the west. “Downtown” was a blinking-light intersection with a small grocery, a post office, a couple of shops, the white clapboard Riverside Inn, The Bluebird restaurant, and its sister breakfast nook, the Early Bird. Most of the buildings had a soft, weather-beaten look that whispered of Echo Bay’s origins as an 1800s fishing settlement. A turn at the blinking light led down to Fishtown, a collection of docks and shanties lining the mouth of the Carp River, which tumbled down, turquoise and cool, from an old mill dam into Lake Michigan.

  She stopped at the blinker to let the Wonder Bread truck back out of the grocery store lot.

  Brad popped into her thoughts, and what he had said the first time they had driven into Echo Bay, pulling the U-Haul. It was a dreary April day, with a fog curling in from the lake.

  “Looks a little like Brigadoon emerging from the mist,” he said.

  She had laughed and leaned over to kiss him, surprised by his romanticism. Brad wasn’t given to such whimsy. He was a serious man, and she liked that about him. She had liked it from the first moment she met him. She had been waiting tables at Shammy’s, three months after having to drop out of Northern. The money had run out; she was lonely, far from home, and maybe, she admitted to herself, a little afraid for the first time in her life. The bar that night was filled with drunken jocks, her feet were throbbing, and someone kept playing “Basketball Jones” on the jukebox, giving her a grinding headache.

  She delivered the pitcher of beer with a sharp thud, and the three men had all looked up at her. One of them said something smart, and his friend laughed. But the third man, the blond with the soft brown eyes, was quiet. Through the smoky haze and neon glow, she met those eyes, and it was like sliding into a warm bath after being out in the cold too long.

  Later, after she moved into his apartment, Brad joked that “Basketball Jones” was their song. In bed, he would sing the song’s stupid words against her neck: “Baby, I need someone to stand beside me. I need someone to set a pick for me at the free-throw line of life, someone I can pass to, someone to hit the open man on the give-and-go and not end up in the popcorn machine.”

  She loved Brad Schaffer. Loved that he could make her laugh. Loved that he was a veterinarian. Loved that his devotion to his large family came so easily and his roots to his boyhood home in Marquette ran so deep. Loved that his compass seemed so true when her own had always been so unreliable.

  Things were perfect for a year as Brad worked in the small clinic in town and she kept waiting tables. Perfect until the day Leach called out of nowhere to offer her a job. He had taught the criminology course that she had taken on a whim. But she had aced it and Leach had noticed her interest. “Had she ever considered being a cop?” he asked during the phone call. Truth was, she hadn’t until then. But she was intrigued. Leach told her that he had relocated to Echo Bay and was now county sheriff, and if she could make it through the academy, he had a job for her.

  The night she told Brad about it, they had their first real argument. He didn’t understand why she wanted to be a cop, he said, why any woman would.

  I want to try this, Brad, I have to try this,” she said. “Can’t you understand? Your work means something to you. And that’s what I’m trying to find, too. I can’t wait tables for the rest of my life. I need to do something I love.”

  It was February, and a driving sleet was beating against the window. For a long time, it was the only sound in their bedroom. They lay there side by side without touching. Finally, Brad turned toward her. “All right,” he said. “We’ll go to Echo Bay. We’ll give this a try for a year.”

  “I love you,” she said. “Thank you for doing this.”

  He was quiet again, then, slowly, he smiled. “You’ll turn me into a troll. Are you happy?”

  A troll was what people from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula called anyone who lived “below the bridge,” the five-mile-long span that connected the Upper and Lower peninsulas.

  “Yes, I am very happy,” she said.

  She suspected he gave in because he thought this whim of hers would pass. Or that she would never make it through the academy. But when she did, he was there, applauding in the front row on graduation day.

  The bread truck pulled out, and Joe glanced at the dashboard clock, remembering that Brad was working an extra shift at the vet clinic down in Traverse City tonight. Nothing to look forward to but an empty cottage and dinner with their dog, Chips.

  She pulled into the station lot. The Leelanau County sheriff’s department was on the marina road that fronted Lake Michigan, and Joe had always thought it funny that one of the best pieces of real estate had been given to the cops. The old stone building had once been the county library but now housed the sheriff’s office on the first floor and the county courthouse on the second. The jail was in the basement, a dank cavern cut into three holding cells that were hardly ever used.

  Joe paused just inside the entrance to take off her hat. The interior, now carved up into offices, was softened by its original oak paneling, fireplace, and old milk-glass light fixtures. Augie Feldman, the dispatcher who had ruled over the department for twenty years, had left his own mark—from the spider plants that he hung everywhere to the cinnamon coffee he brewed every morning.

  “Hey, Augie,” Joe said as she came in the door.

  “Joette, mi amore,” he said. “So give.”

  “Nothing to give,” Joe said, coming up to Augie’s desk to sign off shift.

  “What did you guys find out there?” Augie asked.

  “Bones. Definitely human, probably a girl.”

  “Last time we found any bones was somewhere around 1961,” Augie said. “Turned out to be a hunter who got drunk and wandered off and passed out. No one found him until spring thaw. And not entirely in one piece.”

  “Why did it take so long to find him?”

  “Took that long for his ex-wife to report him missing.”

  Usually, Augie’s humor made her smile, but not today, not after seeing the bones in the woods. She reached up to the sheet on the wall to sign out, but her eyes caught a two-ringed blue binder on the shelf. It was the missing persons file, a compilation of Teletype bulletins that routinely came from law enforcement all across the state.

 

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