Bone Harvest - Mary Logue [85]
Her grandparents called her Meggy and she let them. She figured they were too old to change their ways, and also she thought it was nice to have special names for people. They were the only people who called her Meggy and that worked for her. She would hate that name if everyone called her it. It sounded like a name for a little kid, and that was probably what she would always be for her grandparents.
“Hi, Mom, where are you?”
“Hi, Meg. I’m at work.”
“Figured. How’s it going?”
Her mom didn’t say anything for a moment, and Meg knew she was working too hard. She could hear it in her voice, the way her mom sounded tight and tense, her words coming out in bursts.
“Not bad.” Her mother tried to be cheerful. “I bet you’re having a great time.”
“Not bad,” Meg mimicked her mom. They could both play this game. But she was having a good time. “We went to the zoo yesterday.”
“What did you see?”
“Everything. We even went on the elevated train and saw all the animals out in the wild. I liked that the best. We were enclosed in glass and the animals got to run free. It seems more like the way it’s supposed to be. I even got a cupcake on the train. One of the kids was having a birthday party and they had an extra cupcake.”
“A birthday party?” her mom said, as if she were waking up from a nap.
“Yeah, you know, a celebration when it’s your birthday.”
“That might be it, Meg. A birthday party. Another kid.”
Meg was getting worried. Her mom was rambling. “Mom, what are you talking about?”
“I think I just figured something out.”
“Good.”
“Listen, sweetie. I gotta go. This is going to be over soon, I hope. I’ll talk to you tonight or tomorrow.”
“Love you, Mom.”
“Me, too. Bunches and bunches.”
After noon, Deputy Watkins had called Harold and told him it couldn’t have been Arlene’s mother, as she had been in the hospital. She told him that she was thinking it might be a kid, and that made Harold remember a strange conversation he had had with an odd little boy not too long after the murders. He mentioned it to Claire and told her he’d call her back if he could remember the kid’s name.
Harold remembered the conversation so well because he had told it to Agnes and then he had even written it down. He had thought of turning it into a piece for the paper, but it had seemed too dark, considering how recent the Schuler murders had been, so he had never done anything with it. He was pretty sure he had thrown the piece away in one of his cleansings that happened every few years.
The conversation had happened at the cemetery, when the Schulers were being buried. Harold was standing way toward the back and had started to walk away when he noticed a young boy staring in the opposite direction from the service. The boy, who must have been around six or seven, asked Harold if he knew that there were 236 gravestones in the cemetery.
Harold said, “No, how do you know that?”
The boy stared at him unblinking and then said, “I counted them. Do you know why they have gravestones?”
Harold had thought he knew, but he decided he was more interested in hearing the boy’s thoughts on the subject. “Why?”
“So the bodies don’t fly away. The gravestones pin them down like bugs.”
Harold asked him if he had ever played with the Schuler kids.
The boy spit out, “Never. My dad says no. Krauts, he calls them. I’m no kraut lover.”
The nasty words seemed so strange coming from a young child’s mouth.
“They seemed like nice people to me.”
“But they died.”
“Yes, that was too bad.”
“Maybe they’ll come back,” the boy had suggested.
“I don’t think so.”
“Do bones ever grow new bodies?”
Harold hadn’t thought too much about the question. At the time, Harold had just assumed that the odd child was thinking about the buried bodies all around them. “Not that I know of.”
What Harold couldn’t remember was who the boy had been. On the way home from the cemetery, he told Agnes about the incident and had described the young boy, and she had known him. She might remember.