When the Bones Sing

Chapter One

One

The first time I pulled a skeleton from the ground, I wasn’t even four years old. I’d wandered away from a church picnic while Daddy sat in the shade turning the crank on our old ice cream maker and mopping sweat from his forehead with a faded red bandana. Nana found me on my hands and knees just inside the tree line, chubby fingers plunged deep into the rich, black dirt. Dovie girl , she had scolded. You can’t be takin’ off like that. It’s danger — She froze when she saw me holding a pale finger bone out to her like a prize in an Easter egg hunt. Then her eyes caught fire and she opened up wide enough for me to see clear down her throat when she threw her head back and hollered, “Del! Come look what Dovie’s got! Come see what our girl can do!”

Daddy left the ice cream to melt and scooped me up quick as summer lightning. In one move, his strong hands knocked the bone from my fingers and the damp earth from the front of my dress, and I wailed as he carried me back home.

“Like her mama, God help her,” my Sunday School teacher whispered as we passed. “And her grandmother.” The words wormed their way into my ear, even over the sound of my own shrieking.

“Cryin’ for the dead,” one of the old men added. There were always a handful of them gathered like crows outside the little coffee shop on Mud Street. And the rest agreed like a Greek chorus.

But they were all wrong. I wasn’t worked up over whoever that finger belonged to. I didn’t understand enough back then to weep for someone who was only bones. Somebody I didn’t know, besides.

I was crying because I knew I wasn’t gonna get any of that strawberry ice cream Daddy had been churning. And I’d had my mouth set for it so bad.

I must have been dreaming about that day, because I wake up craving the taste of fresh strawberries cold on my tongue. But as soon as I sit up in bed, I know what it was that pulled me out of my dreams, and it wasn’t the memory of ice cream I didn’t get thirteen years ago.

My teeth are chattering louder than the shuddering air conditioner propped up in the attic window. My whole body is humming. Vibrating at a familiar frequency.

I can feel the dead deep in my bones.

Not all of them. Just one particular soul tonight.

Someone is pissed as hell, and he’s strumming my ribs like a harp. Sliding his fingers up and down my spine like my backbone is the neck of a guitar.

Or a banjo.

That trembling is coming from somewhere outside. It’s seeping into my attic bedroom and soaking into my skin. I throw off Nana’s thick quilt and tiptoe across the creaking wood floor. I stand in the pitch black, willing myself not to peek.

Not to feel what I know I’m feeling.

But the music of the bones gets too loud, and I part the dusty lace curtains to peek out over the air conditioner at the sliver of a moon hanging low above a row of dogwood trees at the dark edge of town.

Out toward the woods beyond our house. Toward the hills.

And the dead.

Down below me, on the front steps, someone clicks on a flashlight and shines it up in my direction. The light bounces off the window glass, and I shield my eyes from the sudden glare.

“She’s up,” Sheriff shouts. “Time to move.” He reaches over to shake the deputy who’s dozing beside him, slouched against our porch railing like an old hound dog at the end of a long hunt. They’ve been posted up out there every night for two months.

Since the latest hiker went missing.

Nana is already knocking on my bedroom door. “Dovie?” She doesn’t bother to keep her voice down, which tells me Daddy must not be home. “Can you feel it?”

“Yeah,” I say. “The bones are playin’ their song.”

It’s just as well Daddy’s working late at the gallery. He never bothers to see me off to do this dark business in the dead of night, anyway. He washed his hands of all that years ago.

About the same time we stopped going to church.

Nana pushes the door open and light spills into my room. “This is a loud one.” Her voice is hushed, and her eyes are closed, like she’s tuning the station on a radio nobody else can hear. “I don’t feel it so strong anymore, but this one woke me up.”

I pull on a pair of shorts and tug a University of Arkansas sweatshirt over my tank top. It’s mid-July—the stickiest, most miserable part of summer in the Ozarks—but these woods get cool at night. Sometimes. When a breeze is sliding through the pines.

And the bones are singing.

I slip on a pair of tennis shoes and follow Nana downstairs. She stops in the kitchen to pour fresh coffee into a thermos for the sheriff and his man. Then she pushes my stringy dark hair back out of my face. “We gotta do what we’re born to do, Dovie,” she tells me.

She knows how much I hate these midnight hikes. The close press of the black forest.

The way Sheriff watches me.

How, at the end of it, I’m left with nothing but this terrible empty ache and dirt under my broken fingernails.

Outside on the front porch, Nana hands the thermos to the sheriff. Her long hair is loose tonight, flowing down her back like a silver river in the moonlight. He smiles and says, “Thank ya much, Miss Fern.”

“Bit of a chill in the air tonight, ain’t there, ma’am?” the deputy adds. His voice is still thick with sleep.

I don’t tell Nana that they won’t drink a drop of her coffee. They never do. Nobody in Lucifer’s Creek would dare let a drop of anything brewed up by Fern Clover cross their lips. I’m sure she knows the sheriff’ll pour it out later, once dawn is tearing at the edges of the sky. Once we’re done with what we’ve got to do.

What I’ve got to do.

Then he’ll leave the empty thermos on the front steps for next time. Because it’s part of the ritual.

Nana and me used to go into the woods together on these kinds of nights, but that was years ago. She’s too old for that now. Her knees can’t handle the steep climbs, and she doesn’t hear the bones as clear as she used to. So she hugs me goodbye and I follow Sheriff and the deputy down the uneven stone path in front of our house and out onto Mud Street.

When I turn and start trudging toward the uphill end of town, Sheriff and Deputy What’s-His-Face step aside to let me lead. They might be the ones with badges and guns, but I’m the one with some kind of magnet buried deep inside me. A strange little seed planted there by DNA handed down from Nana to Mama, and then on to me.

The closer we get to the edge of town, the stronger I feel that mournful hum rattling through me. Kind of a soundless song. Nana was right—the bones are loud tonight. This one is desperate to be found. He’s all jagged staccato notes and the crash of dissonant chords. Cymbals. A violin string twisted tight enough to snap. I shudder and pull the sleeves of my sweatshirt down over my hands, even though a river of sweat is already snaking its way down my back.

And I keep walking.

Lucifer’s Creek is just a speck of a town. It’s been in this spot for almost two hundred years, but Daddy says one real good sneeze would blow it clean away. The only way in is an old logging road that winds its way fifteen miles northeast through the thick national forest from Rogers, the nearest town of any real size. The bumpy ride takes just over an hour, unless it’s been raining so hard the road is washed out. In which case, it’s a total no-go.

Less than five hundred of us call this place home. Creek people don’t count the hill folk living out in the boonies, beyond our neatly swept sidewalks and flowerpots.

And we also don’t count all the city-dwellers who have vacation cabins tucked away in these parts. They come up here weekends during deer season or elk season, or in the fall to see the leaves, all decked out in their fancy outdoor gear. But they spend more time drinking expensive beer and lounging in their hot tubs trying to impress each other with bullshit stories than anything else. Then, come Sunday evening, they head home to their big, important jobs at law firms and banks in Little Rock. Or St. Louis.

The richest of them don’t even have to stop at the brewery in Rogers to pick up their own craft beer, and they hardly feel the bumps at all as they get driven up the old logging road in shiny black Hummers with Moonlight Crag Lodge splashed across the side in bright yellow letters. Those lucky bastards have it made. They get the best of everything while they’re here.

In our hills.

But those of us who call the Creek home full time aren’t rich. Not by a long shot. We scratch out a living off the hikers and hipsters, and it’s barely enough to keep us clothed and fed in a good year.

Tonight, the shops are all deserted, and I don’t even see anyone peeking out from the houses that we pass. It’s so still you’d swear the population of Lucifer’s Creek, Arkansas, was just three.

Me. The sheriff.

And the deputy.

This one is new on the job. The last one only made it a year. Too many damn bodies. That’s what he’d scrawled on a sticky note meant to pass as a resignation letter before he hightailed it back to Fort Smith.

I can’t say anybody blamed him for taking off. Twenty-three bodies in three years would be enough to send anyone running. At least anyone with good sense.

This new guy is only a few years older than I am, and he’s a local. Now that I see him in the moonlight, I recognize his face from school.

We graduate maybe five or six seniors a year, so you’d think I’d remember his name, but despite living right in the middle of town, I don’t pay much attention to the Creek kids. And they don’t like me or my family. I’ve just finished my junior year, and there are some of them I’ve sat right beside in our tiny little schoolhouse since kindergarten and never exchanged a word with.

We continue up Mud Street, and as we start across the bridge over Lucifer’s Creek, the mountain stream that gives this town its unfortunate name, the rotten-egg odor of sulfur drifts up from beneath us, thick in the humid air. This whole area smells like someone without any manners left the doorway to hell standing wide open, but those of us who’ve lived our whole lives here have gotten used to it.

The slow-moving water flowing under the bridge looks black tonight. Slick as obsidian in the moonshine. It can rage like a monster in the spring, when the rains come hard and heavy, but this time of year it’s meek and harmless. Even at its widest point, you could jump across it if you got a running start.

“The kid’s name is Riley,” the sheriff tells me as we leave the old wooden bridge behind, and I repeat the name under my breath, holding it like a stone in my mouth. Feeling the weight of it. “Riley Alden. Age twenty-one. He come over with a church group from Tulsa.” We reach the end of Mud Street and peer into the dark beyond, teetering on the edge where town ends and the woods begin. “Made the first part of the trek just fine, then, comin’ out of Lucifer’s Creek, his buddies lost sight of him around a bend in the trail. Swore he was right up ahead of ’em.” Sheriff sighs and shifts that thermos of coffee he won’t drink from one hand to the other. “That was the middle of May. Ain’t nobody seen hide nor hair of him since.”

I don’t say anything. I’ve heard this before. Sheriff told me all of it the morning he turned up at our front door to warn me that another hiker had gone missing off the Aux-Arc Trail. Stick close to home, Miss Dove , he’d mumbled without looking me in the eye. It pisses him off that I can do what he can’t. We’ll most likely be needin’ you.

“Dovie’ll find him, won’t you?” The young deputy kicks at the ground and raises a cautious eye in my direction. “She always does.” I notice the freckles scattered across his forehead. “She’s a human cadaver dog.” One corner of his mouth twitches up. Like he thinks that’s real funny. “That what the kids at school call her, ain’t it, Dovie?”

Jonah. That’s his name. Jonah Cardell. He’s almost smiling at me.

“Yeah,” I say. “I can feel Riley real strong. We’ll find him tonight, sure.”

That’s enough to spook Jonah, I guess, because he snatches his eyes away from my face and looks back out toward the trees while we stand there smack in the middle of Mud Street.

Stalling.

On our left is the biggest building in town, Lucifer’s Creek Community Church, where everyone but Daddy and Nana and me gathers on Sundays to sing hymns and complain about the weather, and directly across the street from that, on our right hand side, is my daddy’s stained glass gallery, where he spends as much time as he can every day of the week. He works late most nights too, until two or three o’clock in the morning, and when he comes home, his eyes are strained red and his fingers are covered with tiny cuts.

Tonight he must be working in the back room, and I’m grateful he isn’t watching me from the other side of the window glass.

There are no streetlights in Lucifer’s Creek, so the handful of little shops and galleries scattered along Mud Street leave their lights on at night, to give the town a bit of a glow. So it feels friendlier for the hikers who amble back and forth between the Morning Glory Bed and Breakfast down here and the pub tucked away on the other end of town.

Right now the light from Daddy’s gallery window is filtered through a collection of delicate stained glass birds that hang just inside. Cardinals and blue jays. Woodpeckers. Robins. Bright yellow goldfinches. And one midnight-black crow that I’ve always loved best, but nobody has ever bought. The display has us lit up in a rainbow-colored circle of protection, and I’m not ready to leave that warmth and head into the forest. But Sheriff coughs. Shuffles a little. So I know it’s time.

I can’t make my feet move, though.

“Dovie,” Sheriff says, and his voice has a gentle sound to it. Like he’s almost sorry he’s gotta make me do this. “It ain’t gonna get any better. Not till we find him.”

I know he’s right. We can stand here forever, but Riley Alden isn’t going to get any less dead. Now that his bones have started humming, they won’t let me rest until I pluck them one by one from the ground.

So I sigh and dig a rubber band out of my pocket. I pull my hair back into a tight ponytail, to keep it from catching in the undergrowth. Then I take a deep breath.

“All right,” I say. “Let’s go find us a body.”