Bone White Page 20

  What the fuck, buddy? What the fuck?

  And the sour stench of vomit.

  Chapter 62

  It was the feeling of being underwater, the dulled senses. Like when you’re a kid in the pool, and you open your eyes while you’re still beneath the surface. You look up and see the distorted figure of your mother standing at the edge. She’s telling you that it’s time to get out, that if you don’t hurry, the flies are going to eat your PB&J. But underwater, you can’t hear the actual words, only a low mumble letting you know that words are being spoken. Soft reverberations of sound waves traveling through the water and entering your ears. That’s how it was for me. I couldn’t make out the words, but I could feel reverberations all around me.

  When I was finally able to pry my heavy eyelids open, the stark sunlight reflecting off the stainless medical equipment made me clamp them shut again. It was shockingly bright. Like coming out of the womb a second time. I heard a gasp, then a quick shuffle of feet just before the room seemed to retreat into darkness behind my eyelids. Carefully, I forced my eyes open again, and this time, found my mother’s watery eyes looking back at me. Her flushed cheeks were raw and damp.

  “Where am I?” I asked.

  “You’re in the hospital,” she said, wiping the dampness from her cheek with a crumpled tissue that was obviously not fresh out of the box. “Oh, Luke, you’re safe now, baby. You’re safe now.”

  I grinned, or at least I tried to. I didn’t know if it worked, but even the attempt exhausted me. My head sank back into the pillow and the warm embrace of my mother’s love let me drift back to sleep.

  When I opened my eyes again, I found my leg in the air, the sun streaming through the window behind three giant flower arrangements, and the room full of people. A doctor, several nurses, my parents, Cricket, Claire and George Stettler, the New Paris sheriff, all gathered around my bed, looking down at me with a combination of relief and pity. It was like the scene at the end of The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy wakes from her dream. Only the brainy scarecrow was missing. I didn’t see Garrett anywhere.

  “Welcome back,” the sheriff greeted, peering down at me through wireframe glasses. His demeanor was tough, but kind. The wiry gray hair with the permanent indentation from his hat gave credence to the rumors that Sheriff Stettler was only a few months away from retirement. But he was on the job for now, so after telling me I had been in and out for two days, he got right down to business.

  I answered his questions as they came, and the nodding of his head told me that I was mostly corroborating what they had already found out during their initial investigation. They had been awfully busy while I’d been out. Fifteen minutes later, he flipped his notepad closed, and sat back, but I had a few questions of my own.

  “Are you sure you’re up for this, Luke?” my mother asked, her eyes searching from the doctor to me with uncertainty.

  “Yeah, Mom,” I responded. “I can handle whatever the sheriff tells me. I lived through it, remember?”

  She nodded tightly and clutched my hand, while my father escorted my friends to the hallway. Cricket turned on his heels and headed for the door like he couldn’t wait to leave the room, but Claire shuffled her feet. I was grateful they left, though. This would be easier without having to see their faces.

  “We’ll give you some privacy. But he needs his rest,” warned the doctor as he and the nurses turned to leave. “Don’t stay long.”

  I sat a bit straighter in the bed and cleared my throat before addressing the lawman.

  “Did you find Becca?” I asked. “Did you find her –”

  My mother’s grip tightened around my hand, and I witnessed my dad’s arm snake around her for support.

  “We did,” the sheriff assured me. “Her parents have already made the identification.”

  The thought of Becca’s mother having to go through that broke my heart, but I recovered from the thought quickly enough, determined to press forward.

  “There’s something I want to know,” I said, looking Sheriff Stettler in the eyes. “I saw the boxes in the basement. That guy was shipping bones to people all over the world. Human bones. Who … I mean, why … or …”

  The sheriff held up a hand to end my pained search for the right question.

  “Unfortunately, there are folks who buy bones, and I don’t mean for lab specimens and what have you,” he began. “Deviants with a human bone fetish. Goth musicians who think a human femur would look cool strapped to their microphone stand. Perverse individuals hide in all corners of the world, Luke, and unfortunately, they need to get their goods somewhere. It’s the kind of business that can bring in a lot of money, as I understand from the FBI. They’ve been investigating a black market supplier somewhere in this area for awhile now. But it looks like you managed to pinpoint Mr. Barnes’ operation.”

  “Barnes,” I said, dropping my eyes to the sheet covering my lap. It didn’t seem right to give him a name, like somehow that turned him into a person rather than the monster he’d been.

  “Corwin Barnes,” the sheriff continued. “Ex-con released from the penitentiary a couple years ago. Did a stretch for cruelty to animals. I’ll never forget it.”

  “Cruelty to animals?” I asked, my mind still working a bit slowly.

  “Like I said, I’ll never forget it. He used to work at that church. Maintenance mostly. I guess some raccoons kept getting in his trash,” the sheriff said, nodding his head and staring off into space. “Ol’ Barnes finally set a trap and caught ’em all. The whole damn family. Only feedin’ ’em poison or puttin’ a bullet between their eyes was apparently too humane for that sumbitch. Guy was doin’ all kinds of weird shit with the carcasses down in that basement. Skinnin’ ’em, dissectin’ ’em, making artwork and the like. Really sick shit. Anyway, we put him away for awhile, but it looks like he might have used prison as school. Bastard turned his sick obsession into a trade.”

  The sour look on my mother’s face told me that she didn’t care for where this conversation was going. So I changed the subject away from the gruesome stuff. I didn’t see any reason to add to my mother’s discomfort.

  “This Barnes, he and his daughter actually lived there, didn’t they? In the church.”

  “His daughter?” Stettler asked curiously. “Oh, you mean Belinda Turner. The girl hit by the cement truck.”

  “His daughter,” I repeated. “That’s what she called herself.”

  “She wasn’t Barnes’s daughter, although I suppose technically, she’d be his step-daughter,” the sheriff continued after a thoughtful glance up. “Sixteen years old. Mother’s name is Rosemarie, and we’re trying to track her down now. Belinda’s real father, Mr. Ellis Turner, has been deceased for almost nine years now. Killed himself when Belinda was only about four years old. Up and blew his brains out one day and the little girl was the one to find him in the bathroom. Most of him was slumped on the toilet, the rest was all over the wall beside him. A real mess, it was. Helluva thing. Anyway, the missus remarried Barnes shortly before we put him away for the animal nonsense.”

  “If it hadn’t been for that connection, we wouldn’t have even looked at the church,” Stettler said.

  “What do you mean?” asked my dad. “I thought you said that was where everything happened.”

  “That’s where the bodies were, or what was left of them. Except for the girl’s, of course. We responded to the cement truck accident. As messed up as she was, it was a nurse at the hospital who recognized her, but said she and her family had moved away a good year and a half ago. Couldn’t find an address for Rosemarie Turner or a Rosemarie Barnes, and Barnes had skipped out on his probation. Honestly, we wouldn’t have known anything about the murders if one of my deputies hadn’t noted the proximity of Belinda’s accident to the church where her stepfather had committed his earlier crimes. Well, when we put two and two together, we got four so we checked it out. Just walking up to the place we found blood on the porch. Fresh blood. Turned out, it was all th
rough the church. Looked like a massacre took place in there. Even up in the loft. Thanks to DNA samples on file with the prison, they matched the blood to Corwin Barnes. After that, all the signs pointed to –”

  “Wait,” I interrupted, wondering if I’d either missed something or my fuzzy head just wasn’t processing the information correctly. “How did his blood get all through the church? He’s dead. His body’s outside the snack shop by the abandoned beach. You’ll find another body there. An old guy who tried to help me, but Barnes killed him. Henry something.”

  The sheriff’s brow bunched, forming lines between his eyes. “Henry Allen. We searched the area and found him. But not Barnes. A lot of his blood was there, but not him.”

  A lump formed in my stomach despite the fact I hadn’t eaten anything in two days.

  “He’s dead,” I insisted. “I know it. I killed him.” My body strained against the tucked in sheet, trying to rise from the bed. It was my father’s hands that clamped down on my shoulders and held me back.

  “Easy there, Luke."

  I brushed one of his arms away, but stopped struggling. After a few seconds, I laid back in the bed.

  After a long pause, the sheriff shook his head again. “I’m sorry son. We didn’t find any body for Barnes.”

  “Then that means…”

  “Okay, I think Luke needs to rest now,” my mother pronounced, standing and holding her arm out to show the sheriff from the room.

  “No, wait,” I said, stopping them. “What about Garrett. Why isn’t he here?”

  My mother blanched like an almond and her eyes widened. She looked to my father for assistance.

  “We can talk about Garrett later,” he said, after exchanging a meaningful glance with my mother. “You need your rest.”

  I sat up in the bed again. “Well, I can’t rest until I know how he’s doing. I kept expecting him to show up…” I trailed off as pain filled both of my parents’ faces. “He’s … he’s okay, isn’t he?”

  “Luke,” my father said, his tone stern yet comforting. But he didn’t go on. Instead, he gave Sheriff Stettler a nod.

  “We found him, Son,” the sheriff said slowly. He removed his wire-rimmed glasses as he spoke, absentmindedly wiping them with a handkerchief. “Someone, presumably Barnes, had locked him in the shed back behind the church.”

  The shed. I’d run past it when trying to save my own neck. If I’d only known.

  “How is he? Is he okay?”

  You’d have thought that someone had painted a mural on the floor because everyone’s eyes dropped to study it.

  Sheriff Stettler eventually put his glasses back on and picked up his hat from the bottom of the bed, worrying its brim between his fingers. It was at that moment that I knew the answer. Knew it, but still needed to hear it, even as a thousand voices cried out in my head, all of them mine.

  “I’m sorry, Son,” the sheriff said, I could barely hear him over the outpouring of grief inside me. “If it’s any consolation, he went quickly. The body was in a washtub, sliced from stem to stern. He would have bled out quickly.”

  “Garrett’s dead,” I mumbled, being the only one in the room brave enough to say the words. I repeated myself, this time with a bit more volume. I pinned my mother with my eyes as if making her face the reality of it. Swiveling in the bed, I faced Sheriff Stettler head on.

  “Why?” I asked. “Why would someone do this? Do any of it? Just for fucking money? I don’t understand!”

  The sheriff’s head wagged slowly back and forth. “Couldn’t tell you for sure,” he said. “Stuff like this usually comes from a combination of things. Abused as a child. Seeing others harmed. A life full of rejection. Maybe something in the family history. And then there’s always the brainwashing power of plain old blinding greed. We may never know with Barnes,” he said with a shrug. “The simple answer is that sometimes bad people go off to prison, and the system just fucks ’em up even worse. Pardon the French, ma'am.”

  My mother sat down on the edge of the bed, looking like she was planning to hug me. I wasn’t the one she should be comforting. I didn’t need her sympathy. I was the survivor of the whole ordeal. The only survivor.

  I squeezed her hand and with a yawn said, “You’re right. I need some sleep.” When in all honesty, I just wanted to be alone.

  Following on the sheriff’s heels, my father led my mother out of the room, her head turning every couple of steps to make sure I was still there. She wore relief on her face like a mask, but there was still hesitation in her step. Hesitation to leave my side. I gave her a vague smile to let her know I would be okay, even if I didn’t believe it myself.

  Despite the setting sun through the window and the quiet that descended upon the hospital, sleep didn’t come easy. Doctor’s orders or not. I had too much on my mind. There were too many details, too many dead people occupying space in my head that weren’t about to let me sleep. I’d lost too much. I lay awake as darkness descended, remembering every detail of my best friend as if fixing them in my mind would keep him with me. It was all I had left. Memories and tears.

  *

  Sometime during the night, a large vulture came out of nowhere and landed on the metal rail at the end of my bed. Its brown-black feathers interwoven and dusty, the scavenger hobbled over like it had been invited and hopped onto the wedge that held my ankle in the air. Its white head dipped up and down, picking at the cotton dressing wrapped around my ankle. I smiled at its antics, and decided to leave it be. It wasn’t doing any harm.

  Besides, I had the pretty young nurse to focus on. I wasn’t sure when she’d come in, but she was efficiently checking my vitals when I first noticed her. It hadn’t taken long to figure out that nurses couldn’t care less if you slept or not, despite what they told you. At least once an hour, one of them would come in and poke around. They were constantly in and out of the room, checking this, emptying that. I expected this nurse to send my new friend away, open the window and shoo it right on out. But she appeared not to even notice it as she checked my pulse. I laid there with a thermometer under my tongue, watching her stare intently at her watch. Silently, her lips counted the beats one by one. She was tall with auburn-colored hair and soft skin, resembling Becca, my good friend from New Paris High School. Looked just like her, in fact, maybe older by a year or two.

  With her firm fingers gripping my wrist just a little too tightly, she cast a sideways glance up at me and smiled with the same sweet smile I’d hoped to see on Becca’s face when she passed me in the halls at school. A smile that said she was genuinely happy to see me. Then the nurse winked at me. And that’s how I knew it was her. I feebly smiled back and laid there watching Becca go about a nurse’s business, checking this, logging that, doing everything a real nurse would do. Where on Earth had she learned how to do all of it? And to think, I thought she was dead.

  As I watched her, my heart rate started to rise. I could tell it was registering on her stethoscope, because Becca’s smile slowly started to fade, and her forehead wrinkled slightly in puzzlement. I grew very cold, like all the heat in my body was being sucked out through the IV plugged into my hand. I could feel the sheets start to dampen beneath me, and the back of my neck grew cold. Still, my heart rate continued to climb and climb, to the point I thought my chest was going to split and expel my heart through the crevice.

  My hands shot out to grab the bedrails, but they never made it, a tightness held them back. Looking down, I found my wrists bound, strapped to my sides by black leather straps with shiny metal grommets. They hadn’t been that way before, and I looked to Becca for answers, my eyes full of fear. I wanted to beg for help, to plead with her to undo the straps.

  But the nurse was gone.

  Instead, standing beside my bed wearing a long white lab coat and glasses, was the man from the church. The man named Corwin Barnes.

  The disguise didn’t fool me. Neither did the compassionate and calming smile. I knew it was him, and I didn’t even need to see th
e long, shiny bolo knife he held behind his back to prove it.

  He stepped closer, resting a hand on the bedrail. My throat began to constrict, and it became difficult to breathe. My eyes started to water, and my vision blurred. But I could still hear. Unfortunately, I found I could hear just fine. And as he leaned over me, drawing his face and foul breath close, I could hear Barnes murmuring, practically whispering those words I would always remember…

  For the hour to reap has come, for the harvest of the earth is fully ripe…

  Nine Months Later

  Epilogue

  Dumbrăveni, Romania

  (230 km NW of Bucharest, on the Târnava Mare River)

  Arashk Dimir cradles the newly acquired brown package under his arm as he runs along the rain-saturated cobblestone of Mihai Eminescu Street Nr. 5. He passes the pink Hotel Marion where he works clearing tables when there are banquets to be hosted, performing maintenance when there are not. The road is empty on this late morning, save for the occasional car parked in front of the rows of pasty-colored houses. Neighbors, most of whom have known his mother since long before he was born, stand on their sidewalks or in their postage stamp yards tossing waves in his direction as he passes, yet Arashk pays them no mind. He’s finally received his purchase. It took three weeks longer than the website had stated for delivery.

  He can smell the garlicky fragrance of ciorba de burta before he even enters the apartment he shares with his mother. It is a comforting smell and he finds he is already anticipating lunch. At the front door, the key is hesitant to go into the lock, and he has to jiggle it just to get it started. He makes a mental note to oil the lock before he leaves the apartment again.

  Entering the small kitchenette, he kisses his mother on the top of her head. “Bună dimineaţa, Mama.”