Will motioned for him to come. Jordan raised the sickle bar, backed up to more level ground, and turned off the key. Will was at the top of the bank; Ellen, under a bright red and white umbrella, had left her car and was coming toward them.
“Look,” Will said, pointing, when Jordan drew near.
Where they had cut the brambles on the bank, the dirt had been loosened enough to uproot branches. In the newly exposed dirt Jordan saw a flash of gold being washed by the rain, and then he saw that the gold was on a bone, a finger bone. He leaned over and picked it up, a finger bone with a ring on it.
“What is it?” Ellen called from the bridge.
He held it up for her to see, and he thought for a second that she was going to faint. The color washed from her face; she swayed and backed up a step, another.
“There’s more,” Will said. “Leg, ribs...”
Ellen ran back to her car, and Jordan yelled after her, “Go to the trailer and call the sheriff.”
He looked again at the finger bone, gray with encrusted mud, pitted, a man’s finger. The ring was heavy, solid gold maybe, it was fashioned into a coiled snake, its head up and back in striking position, with emerald eyes and a red tongue.
Ellen’s hands were shaking too hard to dial the first time she tried. She took a deep breath, and this time placed the call. Then she dug in her purse for her small address book and found the number for the McMinnville library and dialed. Patty Westwood answered.
“They found some bones,” Ellen whispered hoarsely. “With his ring. The sheriff’s on his way here. Patty, I’ll have to tell him about that night.”
“For God’s sake! Ellen? Is that you? What are you talking about?” Patty’s voice sounded distant and strange.
Ellen started over. “I’m at Jordan’s, in his trailer. I just called the sheriff. Jordan and Will uncovered bones, a finger bone with Philip’s ring. I saw it, Patty! Philip’s ring! They’ll ask questions.”
There was a pause, and when Patty’s voice was back it was cool and forceful. “Listen to me, Ellen. Get out of there. Go home. I’ll come over as soon as I can — fifteen minutes. Don’t wait for the sheriff, just go on home.”
Ellen nodded. “All right. But hurry, Patty. Please. I saw the finger, just a bone, with his ring on it!” She was shaking again; she hung up and stood watching the nearly spastic movements of her hands for a second or two before she hurried out to her car and started back to town, five miles away. In her mind’s eye she saw the finger bone and the ring with the emerald eyes and the darting ruby tongue.
Suddenly the bone was flesh and blood, and there was another hand with an identical ring, both hands moving back and forth over a shallow pottery bowl, and above the hypnotic motions of the hands, a bare torso with snakes painted on it and a gold necklace made of twined snakes with raised heads, emerald eyes, long red tongues. The gold and the gemstones caught the flashing firelight and gleamed, came alive, writhing...
She felt her car swerve, planing, and fought to hold it on the wet road. With the car under control again, she drove more slowly, paying attention now. She entered Crystal Falls on a back street and drove to her apartment, parked, and ran inside.
Her apartment was the ground floor of a three-story house, once an elegant private residence, now three apartments. Inside her door was a foyer with a large mirror on the wall, a closet opposite it. She took off her jacket and hung it up; when she turned she was stopped by her reflection in the mirror. She was ashen, with staring eyes. She hurried to the kitchen, found a bottle of bourbon in the cabinet, and poured some, added water, and drank it down.
After that, she sat at the dinette table and tried to think. It was Philip’s finger, she heard herself saying in her head. She could get no further than that. The doorbell rang, and she ran to admit Patty Westwood.
Patty was thirty-five, five years older than Ellen and twenty pounds heavier, a handsome woman with long black hair and brown eyes. Her normally ruddy face was pale; she looked cold. “Tell me,” she demanded, as she entered the foyer and pulled the door shut.
“I was out at Jordan’s. They’re clearing the upper section of the land, and Will found a bone, a finger bone, with a gold ring that’s like a snake. Philip’s ring.”
“You don’t know that.”
“It’s Philip’s ring,” Ellen repeated.
They had gone into the kitchen where Patty tossed her coat over a chair, went to the sink, and started to make coffee. She was within arm’s reach of Ellen at the table. The kitchen was small, a table and two chairs made it crowded; the other rooms were large and so sparsely furnished they looked barren.
“Look, Ellen, be reasonable,” Patty said, measuring coffee. “You can’t be sure. You saw something and got spooked. Maybe it isn’t even a bone.”
“We’ll have to tell them about that night,” Ellen whispered.
“You’re out of your mind!”
“He didn’t just leave.”
“Honey, sit down and listen to me.” Patty pushed Ellen into a chair and sat opposite her at the small table. “If you even mention that night, and if they really have found bones, and if they identify them as Philip’s bones, you’re as much as confessing that you know what happened to him. They’ll want to know what you were doing out there, what you did after you two left, where you went, everything.”
“I didn’t leave with him. He sent me away.”
“That’s not how we remember it,” Patty said harshly. “He took you away and never came back.”
Ellen shook her head. “He didn’t go with me. He gave me his keys and told me to go home, and I did.”
Patty stood up and turned back to the counter with the coffee maker; she tapped her fingers impatiently while the water trickled down. “Six people will swear he left with you,” she said.
Ellen stared at her in disbelief. She had known Patty all her life, they had worked together in the Blair farm and garden store when Ellen was in high school and Patty at Mount Crystal College. Philip had been one of Patty’s instructors, and she had fallen in love with him, just as Ellen had. They had talked about him for hours.
She remembered the first time she met him. No one ever had treated her the way he had, with respect, as if she were important; she had been sixteen. “Ms. Blair, I need a gift for a very special person, flowers, a blooming plant, something of that sort. What do you recommend?” He had been hired on a two-year contract at the college; everyone in town had known that. In a town of eighteen hundred people there were no secrets. He was rich, they said, and he was handsome, with black wavy hair, a moustache like Burt Reynolds’s, a blue and silver customized van. He had been around the world, they said. A doctorate in psychology by twenty-nine, brilliant. He had been thirty when he arrived to teach at the college, and two years later he had left.
Ellen remembered the afternoon Patty had come to the store, so excited she could hardly talk. She had just graduated from Mount Crystal, and Ellen from high school. “This Saturday night,” Patty had whispered, “Philip’s going to show some of us a Sacred Mushroom ritual!” Six students who had now graduated, she had continued. He had sworn them to secrecy; they were to meet up Crystal River at a campsite, take sleeping bags, be prepared to spend the night... Her voice had shaken with excitement.
Ellen had begged and pleaded until Patty had said she could come, too, but she had to stay way back and not make a sound.
Patty was still waiting for the coffee, getting out cups, half and half, sugar, and Ellen was back there, thirteen years ago.