Bone Doc. Jo calling, to divulge the secrets of the box? For hours, even with the distraction of Bill’s tongue, my mind has been prying the lid open and slamming it shut.
The box is filled with sand, silky enough to run through my fingers like a waterfall.
It is crammed with girls’ jawbones, grinning wickedly at every angle.
It holds a package tied up with glittering black tinsel made of Lydia’s hair.
“Hey.” Bill speaks low into the phone and glances back at me. He listens without interrupting for at least a minute. “Uh-huh. I can reach Tessa.”
He’s zipping up his jeans at this point, balancing the phone between his ear and shoulder.
The doctor had taught me in our sessions that I could have waited five years to sleep with this man, and never really known him. The doc was speaking generally, of course. He believed that a person’s most profound flaws or virtues emerge in great crisis, or they remain buried forever. I remember leaving his office that day thinking it was sad that ordinary, dull people die all the time without ever knowing they are heroes. All because a girl didn’t go under in the lake right in front of them, or a neighbor’s house didn’t catch fire.
“Be there in about an hour,” Bill is saying.
Five of us are stuffed into the tiny room, all looking like we’d come off a sleepless night.
Jo, in running shorts and a well-worn T-shirt that says Pray for Moore, OK. Bill, wearing the same clothes as the night before. Alice Finkel, the flirtatious assistant district attorney, hiding under a face made up with Mary Kay precision, so desperately interested in Bill that it hurts to watch. Lt. Ellen Myron, in Wrangler’s, a gun strapped to her hip.
I concentrate on the three plastic evidence bags, lying in a neat row.
My fingers itch to rip them open and get this grim party rolling.
Lieutenant Myron clears her throat.
“Tessa,” Lieutenant Myron says, “there were three items recovered from the box exhumed in the back yard of Lydia Bell’s childhood home. We’re hoping you can identify the items.”
“There were no… bones inside?” I ask. Just tell me, dammit. Tell me you found a piece of Lydia.
“No. Nothing like that.” Lieutenant Myron flips over one of the bags. I recognize the small book immediately. Gold, frayed cover. A design of yellow flowers with green shoots trickling up toward the title. Poe’s Stories and Poems.
“Can I pick it up?” I ask.
“No. Don’t touch. I’ll do it.”
“That’s Lydia’s,” I confirm. “I was with her when she bought it. Her dad drove us into Archer City to Larry McMurtry’s bookstores.”
Why would Lydia bury this book? After my kidnapping, she probably scourged her room of anything with a yellow flower on it. But Lydia wouldn’t be able to completely part with a treasured book. She’d romanticize it like this, in a time capsule to dig up later.
Except she never came back.
Lieutenant Myron sets the book aside and dangles another bag from her thumb and forefinger. “What about this?”
I swallow hard and peer closer. “A key? I don’t even recognize the random keys in my own junk drawer.”
“So that’s a no?”
“That’s a no.”
“Worth asking.”
Lieutenant Myron reaches for the third bag. She holds it up, six inches from my eyes.
The room is waiting for me.
Tick, tick, tick.
Can everyone hear that? I don’t know if it’s my pacemaker, which never makes a sound, or the deer heart trapped in that box.
At ten, I could recite every word of “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Lydia was better at it, of course. Once, she hid a loud clock under my pillow.
“Tessa?” Bill grips my shoulders. I’m swaying. The ticking is louder. His watch, dammit, near my ear. Tick, tick. I push his arm away.
“I thought this was lost.” It’s the voice of a seething teen-ager. “She must have taken it.”
“Who took it?” The lieutenant’s voice is sharp.
“Lydia. Lydia took it.”
Tessa, 1995
The doctor is already seated in his chair right by the couch. He doesn’t bother to stand up and greet me. I can’t tell by his expression if he is still angry after last week, when I spewed that acid about his daughter being eaten by coyotes. He certainly hadn’t objected when I just got up and stalked out.
I throw my purse on the floor, flop back on the couch, and cross my legs, hiking the skirt so he can see to China. He’s not the slightest bit interested. I could be his eighty-year-old aunt. My face burns hot and angry, but I don’t know why. I twist the ring on my finger, wishing it were his neck.
“Your mother,” he says smoothly. “You found her on the day she died.”
Payback for conjuring his daughter. He’s wielding his sharpest knife today. It opens up a place where I store the exquisite pain of missing her. I want to scream, to shatter that pleasant, professional mask that he snaps on with an invisible rubber band. Sometimes I wonder if I died in that hole. If this room is hell’s purgatory, and everything else-Daddy, Bobby, Lydia, O.J. the Monster-is part of a dream when the devil lets me sleep. If this judge in a pin-striped shirt is deciding whether to throw me in a locked attic with a bunch of cackling Susans or set me free to haunt our killer for eternity.
“I’m leaving.” I say this yet remain planted on the couch. “I’m done with your dumb games.”
“That’s your decision, Tessie.”
I was in the tree house.
She had called my name from the kitchen window. I thought she wanted me to help with the dishes. She always made a mess. Grease and flour everywhere. Crusted pans. Dirty bowls in the sink. Daddy said it was the price for biscuits that crumbled in your mouth, fudge frosting, fried okra scramble with potatoes and tomatoes that we ate like popcorn, cold, as leftovers.
I was in the tree house. But I ignored her.
“You found her on the kitchen floor.”
My heart bangs against my chest.
“You were eight years old.”
Her face is blue.
“She died of a stroke,” he says.
I pull up the skirt of her apron. Cover her face.
“Are you angry that she isn’t here? That she left you?”
I was in the tree house.
I didn’t come when she called.
The guilt is roaming free now. Almost unbearable.
“Yes,” I breathe out.
Tessa, present day
The object in the third plastic evidence bag on Jo’s desk is tiny, probably never of importance to anyone but me and its first owner, a little girl in a frilly petticoat who is long dead and buried.
When I was fifteen, I found the ring in the bottom of a basket of junk in an antiques store in the Stockyards. It was so caked with filth that I didn’t see the inset pearl, like a microscopic spider’s egg, until I got it home. The ring fit perfectly on my pinky. The owner of the store told me it was a Victorian child’s ring from the 1800s, probably gold-filled, which is why she said she could give it to me for $35, but certainly not the $10 I suggested. Lydia countered to the woman that she wouldn’t have known the ring existed if we hadn’t wandered in. “Tessie could have just stuck it in her pocket,” Lydia spewed indignantly, at which point I slid an extra $25 of my Christmas money across the counter and dragged my best friend out the door.
Halfway down the block, Lydia decided that I had purchased the ring against the will of the universe and wanted me to return it. It’s bad luck to wear the jewelry of a dead stranger. Who knows what kind of terrible things happened to the girl who wore it? In Victorian times, children were raised by cruel nannies and saw their parents once a day by appointment. Winston Churchill said he could count the number of times he’d been hugged by his mother.