“Dog finds bone? Alert The Bugle,” Ryan said on the other end of the phone. His tone was good-natured, but I could hear the strain of the day’s events in his voice.
“Thing is, she found it up at the quarry,” I said. “And I think it might be human.”
“Damn.”
“It looks really old.”
I was hyperaware of the fingers and palm of my right hand. They didn’t tingle, precisely, but I couldn’t shake the sense that they’d been contaminated by touching that bone.
“Do you know whereabouts she found it?”
“I think so.”
I described the huge boulder in the thicket of bushes way off the path. While I spoke, I went upstairs to my bathroom. Washing my hands would at least remove any microbes from my skin, though I doubted it would cleanse the dark taint lingering in my mind. When I got to the basin, cold water was dripping from the faucet. I shoved the lever to the left. What I needed was hot water, and lots of it.
A thought occurred to me.
“I could be completely wrong, though,” I said to Ryan. “About it being human, I mean. It’s probably from a moose or a deer.”
That would be the most logical explanation. Why hadn’t I thought of it immediately?
“We’ll check. Ronnie and the forensic team will search that spot in case there’s more to find, but I’ll come over and get the bone from you now.”
“Okay, see you soon.”
With Ryan on his way, I probably didn’t have time for a shower, but I scrubbed my hands thoroughly with a nailbrush, wincing as the soap and hot water stung my scraped hand. Then I washed my face and, still feeling unclean, brushed my teeth, too.
I turned off the faucet, checked it wasn’t dripping, and then texted my mother, telling her something unexpected had come up and we’d need to reschedule supper to the next night. Ryan arrived a few minutes later. The dogs, predictably, launched into a cacophony of barking. My heart lifted a little to see his face, though I wished he was visiting under different circumstances.
When he bent over to pat the dogs for a moment — Lizzie was leaping up against him, whining for his attention, while Darcy was snuffling around his boots — I snuck a look at his rear. Nice and lean. I pulled my gaze away before he caught me checking out his booty, and led him inside the house.
Not wanting to go near the bag with the bone, I merely pointed him in the direction of it. He peered inside the bag and grimaced. “Oh yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s a human rib. The Medical Examiner’s office will confirm it.”
“I touched it, and Lizzie chewed on it,” I confessed, watching as he donned latex gloves to drop the bone into a large evidence bag. “And this is going to sound funny —”
“Funny-haha, or funny-strange?”
“Strange.” Definitely strange. I began chewing on a nail, then remembered what my fingers had touched and dropped my hand.
“Let’s hear it.”
“When I touched it, I felt —” How to say this? “I got a bad feeling, like a sense that there’s something … wrong with it.”
“It’s a human rib, Garnet, found in the wilds. I’m guessing our John or Jane Doe didn’t have a peaceful death at home with family gathered around singing Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. You wouldn’t need much imagination to think that this” — he waved the bagged rib at me — “has some unpleasant history.”
That made sense. Of course a human bone found where this one had been would likely have some bad story attached to it. I would unconsciously have known this, and my imagination might have rushed in to create the accompanying visceral “soundtrack” of doom and gloom. But while my rational mind seized on this perfectly logical explanation, the rest of me remained unconvinced.
Because I hadn’t imagined it.
What I’d experienced had been deeply disturbing, terrifying even. It hadn’t been the normal thrill of horror — that almost pleasant mixture of excitement, relief and morbid fascination — that a person sometimes feels when they brush up against remote tragedy. There was nothing normal about what I’d felt.
“Yeah, that’s true, but …” My voice trailed off as I weighed the wisdom of saying more.
For one thing, I liked Ryan. I thought he might be interested in me, too. I didn’t want to ruin any good opinion he might have of me.
Back in December, he’d witnessed some of my strange behavior, but I’d never explicitly told him what I’d seen and heard, and I’d ducked his questions on how I’d known facts I shouldn’t have been able to, merely telling him my conclusions must have been lucky guesses. But back then, I’d been convinced I was going crazy, or that what I was experiencing was temporary. Now I was starting to think differently.
So, I teetered on the edge of a cliff of my own. Should I take the leap and tell Ryan Jackson the truth? Trusting didn’t come naturally to me; it came harder than when my seventeen-year-old self leapt off the high ledge at the quarry and fell into the water hole below. Back then, I’d been buoyed up by beer and Colby’s encouragement. Now I was stone cold sober, and on my own.
I thought again of that woman lying broken on the frozen ledge at the quarry, saw a flashback — black, white and red — of her crumpled body. According to my gut, and what I’d “seen” and felt, her plummet off that cliff had not been voluntary. The cops, however, seemed set to write her death off as suicide. How much did that matter to me?
With Colby, I’d felt I owed him, that I needed to ensure justice was done for his sake. But this victim was a stranger to me. Did I owe her anything? I thought maybe I did, that maybe we humans were all bound together by an invisible web of humanity, and that we owed each other a duty of care. Bottom line: if that had been me lying dead on the snowy ice, and someone else suspected I’d been murdered, I’d want them to speak up.
The irony of an atheist speculating about what she’d want when she no longer existed to have any preferences or volition wasn’t lost on me.
“But?” Ryan prompted.
“We’re going to need coffee for this.”
The dogs followed us into the kitchen, but as soon as they realized that no food was in the offing, they flopped into their baskets. I put on the coffeemaker, and keeping my gaze on the machine so that I didn’t have to see Ryan’s expression, I tried to explain this strange stuff in a way that wouldn’t sound embarrassingly insane.
“I never told you this, but in the weeks after I drowned, I had a couple of strange experiences — episodes, I guess you could call them — when I felt and saw and kind of heard things.”
The first drops of coffee trickling into the pot were loud in the silence that followed.
“What, like flashbacks or memories?” Ryan asked.
“Yes, both of those. But they were of things I’d never experienced. They were other people’s memories,” I said, risking a glance at Ryan to check his reaction.
He didn’t laugh. But he didn’t say anything else, either. No doubt he was waging an inner war between amused incredulity and innate good manners.
“The memories — they were mostly Colby’s.”
Ryan’s lips tightened a fraction.
“Look, I know it sounds insane,” I said, before he could. “For a long time, I thought that it was insane, that I was having a mental breakdown, or that my symptoms were due to post-traumatic stress or concussion. I even checked in with my psych professor, and for the record, he didn’t think I’d gone off the deep end.”
Ryan nodded, perhaps relieved to see I could appreciate the absurdity of what I was saying and had taken appropriate measures to have my mental state assessed. That while I may have boarded the express train to Woowooville, I hadn’t yet reached the end of the line.
The coffeemaker sputtered and I poured us each a cup. Ryan took his with cream but no sugar; I took mine black and bitter, like I had ever since I’d drowned. Like Colby had taken his. I sipped it, welcoming the searing heat.
“And then all the weird stuff stopped.” More or less. “I thought it was gone for good.”
“But it’s back?” Ryan asked.
“When I touched that bone, and before, at the quarry, I experienced more … funny stuff.”
“Was that when you turned as white as a sheet and fell over?”
I nodded, waiting for him to dismiss the incidents, or at least make light of them.
Instead, he said, “Your eyelids were fluttering. Same as they did that time I found you going fetal at the Pond.”
I shrugged. I would’ve thought that when I saw the flashes, my eyes would behave as they did in dream sleep — moving rapidly from side to side as they scanned the inner scenes playing out in my mind’s eye.
“So, what did you experience?” he asked, sounding genuinely curious.
I explained what I’d felt at the top of the cliff and when I’d accidentally touched the body. The fear and panic, the feeling of having been pushed. How I’d had a flash of the blue note paper a microsecond before I’d actually seen it, and that it hadn’t felt like déjà vu.
Ryan watched me closely while I spoke and nodded noncommittally when I finished.
“You said something about the bone. Did you get a feeling then, too?”
“Yes, as soon as I touched it. But that was different.”
I worried at a rough edge of a fingernail with my teeth, then stopped when his gaze flicked to my mouth. My decade-long struggle with anxiety expressed itself in two horrible conditions officially called onychophagia and excoriation — nail-biting and skin-picking. I knew the habits were gross, but they were also automatic, and when I was especially anxious — like now — the urge was almost irresistible.
Ryan leaned up against a counter and sipped his coffee, as if settling in to hear all the details. “Different how?”
I couldn’t find words to explain it and feared it would sound ridiculous even if I could, so I merely said, “I didn’t hear or see anything specific. It just felt —” Evil, that was the most accurate word for it. “Bad,” I finished lamely. “It shook me to my core.”
I stared at Ryan, trying to assess his reaction to what I’d told him, but his expression was unreadable. If he felt the extreme skepticism which I suspected he must, he hid it well; there was no snort of laughter and no eye-rolling. As a cop, he had to be used to hearing some wild stuff.
Eventually, he said, “I can see this has shaken you, and you think it means something —”
Before he could utter the big fat “but” on the tip of his tongue, I interrupted. “It did with Colby.”
Ryan’s brows drew together. “What do you mean?”
“The stuff I saw and heard in here” — I tapped my temple — “and the feelings I got, that’s how I figured out who’d killed him.”
He scrubbed a hand across his mouth. “I wondered how you knew some of that stuff. Are you saying Colby sent you clues?”
“I know it sounds bizarre. And I’m not claiming to be a psychic or anything,” I babbled, already regretting my decision to spill the beans.
He gave me a long, assessing look. “And are you still … in contact with Colby?”
“I don’t think so.”
He opened his mouth as though to speak, closed it again, frowned harder and then said, “To be honest, Garnet, I’m not sure what to do with this.”
Me either, buddy.
He finished his coffee and began jingling his car keys, clearly eager to be gone.
“Could you just check it out — that woman’s death? Don’t automatically assume it’s suicide, okay?” I said as I saw him out.
“Sure.”
And I couldn’t tell if that was a “Sure, I’ll investigate thoroughly” or a “Sure, whatever lady, just let me get the hell away from your crazy ass.”
Either way, I figured no romantic dinner invitation would be coming my way anytime soon.