Bone Deep

“A joke?”

His gut tightened. Remembering the shocked expression on Kat Riley’s face and the tremble in her voice, he said grimly, “If it’s a joke, it’s a nasty one.”

He thought about that as he walked to his car. A joke—if you could call it that—meant the bone had been planted there for her to find. But from what she’d said, it hadn’t been lying on top of the compost in her wheelbarrow, or on the worktable. In theory, she could have dumped it in a plant pot without ever spotting it. Which would have meant a nice surprise for someone else.

An innocent explanation would violate his rule regarding coincidences, but shit did happen, right?

He took the bone to Wallinger’s the way he’d planned. It got in that damn compost somehow, and Grant would be a lot happier to find that had happened here rather than at the nursery.

Fred Wallinger himself came out of the office. A backhoe was turning one steaming pile of compost behind them, while a couple of guys were feeding yard debris into a shredder that crunched up its meal, choked occasionally, and spewed digested bits in a plume.

They had to raise their voices to be heard over the din. A middle-aged, bulky man wearing quilted coveralls over a red buffalo plaid wool shirt, Wallinger shook his head at Grant’s question about stray fingers. “Haven’t heard of any such thing in a long time.” He grunted. “Well, ’cept over at Northland. Guy lost four fingers to a saw. Maybe six months back? Didn’t you hear at the time? You could ask over there. Seems they might have reattached ’em, though. Doubt they lost any.”

The sawmill, the only one left in Fern Bluff despite the town’s logging past, was less than a quarter of a mile down the road.

A logging truck rumbled past as Grant parked and got out, breathing in the tangy smell of sawdust. The piles of logs went on and on and on, a giant’s version of pick-up sticks.

He stepped into the office and found the receptionist, a busty blonde, happy to talk to him. She abandoned her headphones and computer and leaned against the short counter, arms crossed on it.

“Oh, that was Wally Camp.” Her eyes widened in remembered distress. “It was awful! I guess he just got distracted, and that saw sliced clean through. He’s on disability right now.” She lowered her voice. “From what I hear, he’s not going to be able to come back.”

“Were they able to reattach his fingers?”

“Only two of them.” She wrinkled her nose. “The other two were practically ground up, is what I heard.” Her tone brightened. “But at least he didn’t cut off his thumb, too.”

“Do you have an address for him?”

She did, and shared it.

Wally lived a good fifteen minutes outside of town, deeper in the Cascade foothills. The two-lane, yellow-striped road wound along the river by new developments of outsize, suburban houses that looked misplaced in this rural setting even if they did sit on five-acre lots, dairy farms held on to by stubborn old-timers and second-growth forest. Not far above, snow clung to the trees, defying the promises of spring at the nursery.

He found the address scrawled in white paint on the side of a dented mailbox and turned onto a rutted dirt driveway that led to a run-down, single-wide mobile home and rusting metal shop or garage. A couple of enormous mixed-breed dogs came howling from a hole beneath the porch to circle his car, froth splattering the window and claws scratching the paint job as he slowed.

Since their tails wagged furiously as they waited for him to get out, Grant took a chance and opened the door. Apparently he was the high point of their day. He petted, told them they were good dogs, and they happily bounded ahead of him across the frozen yard to the trailer.

He’d have thought the pandemonium would bring someone out, but when he knocked a voice yelled over the din of a television, “Leave it on the porch!”

“Mr. Camp?” He knocked again.

After a long pause, the door opened. Grant’s first thought was to wonder why this kid of Wally Camp’s wasn’t in school. He’d seen the traffic near the high school as he went by and knew this wasn’t a holiday or in-service day.

But then he saw the hand, dangling at the kid’s side as if he no longer knew quite what to do with it.

Wally, a scrawny redhead, had to be older than he looked.

He’d better be, Grant thought with quick pity. Other wise, who the hell had let him operate a saw?

Though it was now late afternoon, Camp looked as if he’d barely rolled out of bed. He hadn’t shaved in days, leaving patchy growth on his gaunt jaw. From the odor wafting out, he hadn’t remembered to shower, either.

“I thought you was the UPS guy,” Wally said. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay. Wally Camp?”

“That’s me. Dad’s not here, if’n it’s him you want.”

Huh. He had arrested a Camp one time, after a bar brawl, if his memory served him. Robert? Ray? Grant could see the family resemblance. Apparently Wally was used to cops coming calling.

“No, I’m here about your hand,” he said.

“My hand?” Wally echoed, forehead creased. Then his voice quickened with hope. “You mean, you think the mill committed some kind of crime?”

Grant shook his head, pity seizing him again. Along with it came uneasiness that made him want to back away. He should have phoned, not come in person. He didn’t want to see this kid’s misery.

“No. Sorry. We’ve had a finger bone show up where it shouldn’t be, and I understand you’re the only person in town who has lost any fingers in the recent past.”

Wally Camp gave a bitter laugh. “So I’m famous now, huh? Too bad that don’t pay the bills.”

Grant regretted having raised the subject at all. He could see that the kid’s hands weren’t big enough to have bones the size of the one in Grant’s pocket.

Obligated to say something, he asked, “You getting physical therapy for that hand?”

Wally gave a dispirited shrug. “Yeah, but what’s the use? Doctors say the nerves ain’t growing the way they was supposed to. And it’s my right hand.”

Grant wanted to be gone so bad, keeping his feet rooted to the porch required a physical effort. “You’re getting disability, aren’t you?”

“I’m twenty-three. What am I gonna do for the rest of my life?”

What decent answer could he give? It wasn’t any help to say, “one of these days that mill’s going out of business, too, and then you’d be starting over anyway.”

Because at least he would have been starting over with two good hands.

“Did they even try to attach your other two fingers?” he asked.

Wally shook his head. “They was chewed up pretty good. I heard ’em say there wasn’t nothin’ left to save.”

Grant thanked him for his help and left, accompanied to the main road by the two dogs, who cheerfully pretended to be chasing him off their property.

He felt lousy about the visit and kept thinking, Bet I made his day.

Since he’d failed to find the owner of a missing finger, his speculation inevitably circled back to Kat.

Grant made himself be analytical. Did Kat know damned well where that bone had come from this morning? Would it have vanished immediately if her employee hadn’t unexpectedly walked in on her?

If so, she was an amazing actress. Grant would swear she’d been shaken to her core.

Hugh Riley had disappeared from the face of the earth that morning four years ago, after driving away from the nursery just before 10 a.m. He didn’t get pulled over by the highway patrol or cross the Canadian border, he didn’t use his ATM card, he didn’t show up at any nursery or plant farm, including the one he’d supposedly planned to visit. Not one single witness had reported seeing his truck. He pulled out of the nursery, turned west toward I-5, and apparently crossed into some other dimension.

A single tear had slipped down her cheek that day as her voice sank to a whisper. “He didn’t signal. That’s one of my pet peeves, when other drivers don’t. I watched him go, and was irritated because he didn’t signal.” Her teeth sank into her lip so hard, Grant had expected to see blood. “And there was hardly any traffic. He didn’t even have to wait, so no one else would have seen his blinker anyway. It was just…” A shudder racked her, and she didn’t finish.