The Summer Bones (4 page)

“They're both frantic,” Damon elaborated as they walked slowly toward the house.

“Great,” she said again, hollowly.

Damon understood the darkness implicit in that one word. “Quite,” he agreed.

* * * *

The back door was open, the screen a translucent barrier of gray mesh into the kitchen. Victoria paused just outside, hand on the latch, her gaze sweeping across the comforting details—scrubbed pine table, worn beige linoleum, chipped enamel sink, blue china stacked lovingly in the maple hutch in the corner. The warm air was heavy with the smell of baking bread and the aroma of roast beef. She could see the familiar figure of her grandmother at the sink, peeling potatoes.

Achingly normal, all of it—the gray-haired woman bent at her task, the warm sunny kitchen, the homecoming with her hand on the door. Victoria gave the screen a gentle push and went inside.

“Gran?”

As her grandmother turned from the sink, her face lit up in unqualified welcome and delight. With relief, Victoria saw absolute recognition cross her gentle features.

“Honey, how wonderful!”

It was automatic to cross the room and be enveloped in the usual effusive hug. Victoria inhaled the essence of talcum powder, laundry starch, and gentle sweat. Smiling, she bent and gave her grandmother's withered cheek an affectionate kiss. The skin under her lips felt like well-worked, buttery leather.

“I missed you, sweetie.” Her grandmother reached up to stroke her face lightly.

“I'd come home more often, but …”

“I know how it is. Busy, busy, with school and your young man.”

Simply put. Victoria smiled. “Yes.”

“It's the way of our world now, isn't it?” Her pale blue gaze shifted past her granddaughter's shoulder to fasten on the figure just coming in the door. “Damon, don't you track filth into my kitchen.” Her gray brows snapped together.

“I guarantee to keep all filth on my person until I reach the shower,” Damon promised mildly, stopping to set down Victoria's suitcase and carefully remove his shoes.

“See that you do.” A sniff, but an affectionate one, was given in tolerant love.

Mildred Paulsen stepped back and wiped her hands on her checkered apron, bright eyes flitting from her only grandson back to Victoria. “Do you want coffee, you two?”

Coffee—the Scandinavian equivalent to heaven. Some things never changed. A small shudder crept up Victoria's spine. It was at least ninety degrees outside. “No thanks,” she said hastily. “I'll make myself some iced tea. Damon?”

He grinned, a smile of immediate understanding through the grime and sweat. His teeth looked very white. “Tea would be great. Stick it in the fridge for me, will you? I'm off to clean up.”

Victoria watched him pad through the kitchen on bare feet. He disappeared through the door into the hallway and his footsteps thudded on up the stairs.
Thank God
, Victoria thought absently as she moved to take a glass pitcher out of the cabinet,
Damon
put in another bathroom last year
.

Until then, there had been only one, a small affair downstairs, shared by everyone in the house. Damon had remodeled a walk-in closet upstairs to good effect, and only had to share it when guests like herself came to stay.

He slept in the same bedroom he'd occupied during boyhood summers. Upstairs had always been for guests and children, and she and Emily shared a room at the end of the hallway with sloping ceilings, a square window, and twin spindle beds—she and Emily, the two brown-haired children of her parents' disastrous attempt at marriage.

Slowly, Victoria opened the cupboard and took out the box of tea bags. The sound of a car coming down the lane was clearly audible through the open window and door.

Lord
, she thought, digging out the fragrant tea bags and dropping them into the pitcher.

It was probably her father, or even worse, her mother. Her ears still rang with the memory of the conversation she'd had with her mother on the morning when Emily's disappearance had reached the fourth day. “Come home,” her mother had dramatically insisted, as if Victoria's presence would solve a damned thing. Emily had come by her flare for drama through genetics.

Her hands were steady as she filled the kettle with water and set it on the stove. The burner crackled to blue life as she adjusted the knob.

Her father wasn't much better. As introverted as her mother was extroverted, and even quieter since the divorce. His mute silences were nearly as painful as her mother's volatile rages.

Once, Victoria believed, they had laughed, loved, and lived with each other, but not in her memory. She simply recalled the wasteland of her youth. Whatever her parents had once felt for each other—passion, love, tenderness—had faded quickly, leaving them to live like strangers, bound together by twin daughters and some sort of compulsive need to continue what they had started.

Waiting for the water to begin to rumble in the kettle, Victoria opened the freezer and took out a tray of ice cubes, dropping them one by one into a glass. Her grandmother hummed at the sink, washing the potatoes and setting them on a worn cutting board.

A second car was coming down the drive.
If they arrived together
, Victoria thought remotely,
that would be rich—awkward even beyond the usual. It'll
give them a chance to really get going at each other before they even come in the door
.

To compound everything, the phone began to ring.

The sound was faint, coming from an obscure distance. It was typical of her grandmother to ignore it, her hands still deftly dealing with the potatoes. Her grandparents viewed having a telephone as a useless modernization, keeping the instrument in question firmly ensconced in the faraway depths of the parlor.

“I'll get it,” Victoria offered, abandoning her tea making. Anything was better than waiting for the opposing forces to come through the door. Anything. With wooden precision, she walked toward the hallway.

The lower level of the house consisted of the kitchen, her grandparents' bedroom, a den that everyone referred to as the television room, a bathroom, and the formal parlor. The phone sat on a small carved walnut table by a window that boasted a view of smooth, verdant lawn and waving green fields. Little used, the treasures of the house filled the space—ornate antique glass-fronted cabinets, old china, and Bokhara rugs. The musty smell of gently decaying fabric filled the air as she sat down in a velvet chair and picked up the receiver.

“Victoria?” A voice said, nearly choked to beyond recognition.

“Ronald?” Something in his tone made her chest tighten, interfering with her breathing. She was suddenly aware of a frayed thread on the seat of her chair. Flicking at it with her fingernail, she painfully bit her lip. “What is it? What have you heard?”

He swallowed and said harshly, “The police have found Emily's car.”

“Thank God.”

“No. Did you hear me? Not her, just her car.”

Daniel Haase didn't like this part of his job. Other aspects were more appealing, even the mundane business of helping people get into their locked cars, issuing tickets for routine traffic violations, or picking up stray animals violating the current leash laws. He liked his role in the community, liked helping people, liked the satisfaction of upholding the law. But he disliked the ugliness inherent to his profession. Domestic quarrels were the only thing worse than talking to the family of a possible homicide victim.

He knew more than enough about domestic discord.

His hands tightened on the wheel and he slowly exhaled. The last thing he had wanted was the screaming argument with his wife that morning. Laura had been white-faced with defensive rage, and he had been the usual stoic, blind fool—a complete and utter fool.

She was sleeping with someone else and he was an idiot not to have seen the signs earlier. Or maybe he
had
noticed, but had just pushed the niggling doubt to some remote corner of his mind where he didn't have to look at it or examine it. For God's sake, he thought painfully, it was his job to take a certain set of facts and find the logical explanation. Instead, it had taken a discarded condom hidden in a tissue in the trash can in his bathroom.

“Our bed?” he'd demanded, as if that made a difference when it was his wife. “Couldn't you screw him somewhere else?”

“Don't be crude.” Laura went red, then pale, her face mottled with anger, and what could have been relief.

“Christ!” He'd felt the bubble of a bitter laugh in his throat, choking him. “I beg your pardon, I really do.”

“I was going to tell you.”

“I want to know who.” The question was unreasonable, irrelevant to their problems, and they both had known it. “Who” didn't matter. All that mattered was that it wasn't him.

She'd told him—a meaningless name. Not that he didn't recognize it, just that his head seemed to suddenly be thick and heavy.

He'd left. Walked out in the full fury of the wronged and outraged adult male. Walked out knowing his existence had changed forever, and he blamed the most important person in his life for that terrible betrayal.

He blamed himself.

The road shimmered with the latent heat of a waning day. Above him, the sky was perfect, an arc of cerulean blue without the blemish of a single cloud, deepening now toward dusk. A turkey vulture lingered above a green field on dihedral wings—alone, intent, the only interruption in the vast, soaring wilderness.

The Paulsen farm was just a couple of miles from Mayville. Danny had waited until he had the fax of the actual missing person report on his desk before he decided to drive out and talk to the family. The overworked Indianapolis PD was only too glad to get rid of the case, passing it along to him with a sigh of relief.

Frowning, he switched on his turn signal, a ridiculous effort on a road that didn't see more than twenty cars a day, and turned in at a black mailbox with the name Paulsen in bold, square white letters.

It was a well-kept place. The white farmhouse ahead was fresh with paint, the yard trim, the grass cut and raked. Sturdy fences in good repair skirted the farmyard, hemming in a large red barn and pens for livestock. Fields of healthy corn stretched on either side of the long lane, and a patch of woods to the left indicated a good-sized pond.

He had, he reflected as he drove, known Damon Paulsen for most of his life. They were close to the same age and Damon's father had been his family's doctor ever since he could remember. They had also played Optimist ball every summer on the same team during their teens—the Sidewinders, twice trophy winners. Danny smiled faintly at the memory.

The two Paulsen girls were part of the same nostalgic set of images—pretty twin girls with long, curly brown hair and eyes the color of deep water. He remembered them at the ballpark, at the municipal pool, at summer church dances. They had lived in Indianapolis during the school year, but spent their summers with their grandparents on the farm.

He wondered idly what had happened to Emily as he slowly drove up toward the house. He knew she'd married—the report said as much—and lived in Indianapolis with her husband, one Ronald Sims, who was apparently an artist of some stature in all the right circles.

She was twenty-six years old now, an interior decorator with an impressive Carmel address. No criminal convictions, not that he had expected any, but one never knew. People turned up missing for a variety of reasons.

He wondered how her husband was taking her sudden, unexplained absence. If anything ever happened to Laura … His heart twisted painfully in his chest. But then, if Laura disappeared, he had to admit to himself, he would know where to look for her.

Hell
, he thought in violent misery, and parked the car in a patch of burnished sunshine by a small blue car with Illinois plates.

* * * *

Victoria watched the police car slide into place by her car, an inevitable and grim statement of reality right there in the driveway. The new arrival was actually a relief, bringing an end to the most uncomfortable and tension-filled dinner of her life. The congealing plate of food in front of her was a tribute to the entire family's devotion to polite convention. Even in the face of severe emotional strife and possible calamity, they had all sat down obediently to eat when ordered to do so.

“Honey, you haven't touched a bite.” Her grandmother bustled around the table, frowning at Victoria's full plate. “Didn't you like it?”

“I'm not too hungry.”

“I hope you aren't coming down with something.” Still frowning, the older woman put an exploratory hand on her granddaughter's forehead.

Victoria gaped upward.

It was Damon who said quietly, “Maybe it's the heat, Gran. No one seems to have an appetite. Here, I'll help you with these dishes.”

She doesn't understand
. The unspoken message was quite clear as he got to his feet.

Victoria managed a ghastly smile of reassurance, getting up quickly to take her own plate to the sink. So far, her grandmother had seemed normal, even registering the same dismayed shock as everyone else at the news of Emily's abandoned car.

The three other people at the table said nothing.

Like a convention of statues, they sat immobile in their chairs, not speaking to each other, not voicing concerns or opinions. Victoria sent a furtive backward glance as she rinsed her plate. Her father looked awful, the hollows under his cheekbones showing gaunt shadows. Fine featured, with elegant hands and thinning brown hair, he seemed to be incandescent, a shimmer of faded manhood, with all the sorrow and apathy of failure on his shoulders.

Her mother was the opposite, as usual. Sitting upright in the pine ladder-back chair, her slender shoulders stiff with suppressed emotion, she looked intensely alive and vibrant. Worry burned in in tense spots on her pale cheeks and in the deep lines incised around her nose. Her lipstick looked like dried blood on her mouth.