Bone Music

What if I dropped it or lost it? Whoever picked it up would probably think it was someone’s idea of a novel, that’s what.

Maybe it’s as simple as I can’t really think of anything else to do with my hands right now. It’s a long flight, SFO to Atlanta. About four hours. And Luke’s only pretending to watch the movie on his phone; I can tell.

Still, it’s comforting to have him next to me. It’s comforting to know he watched me do what I did in Pemberton’s basement and he doesn’t recoil from me. He isn’t afraid of me. He doesn’t believe some incurable darkness has been unleashed in me. He looks at me with a protectiveness and steadiness I’ve never seen in the eyes of another man. It’s not like the way Marty looks at me, with a lot of smiles and winks to hide how worried he is. Luke is there. Present. Constant. Ready.

Which is good.

Because I need him.

I need this journal, too. I need these words. They’re mine. They exist between all the other versions of my life that have been forced on me over the years. They exist outside the terrible choice Cole Graydon has given me.

Maybe this really will be the last chapter of the story that began with my mother’s murder. Maybe I really will walk away, no matter what that entails.

If I do, does this mean I should keep this book, or burn it?

Cole sent me another e-mail this morning. I got it as we were boarding: “Hope you have a productive meeting. I look forward to seeing your decision. —C.”

I showed it to Luke. “Seeing,” he said back to me. So I wasn’t the only one who noticed the unusual wording.

“So they’re gonna be watching us,” he said.

I nodded. Watching us today.

And maybe always.

If that’s the price of being able to bring Pemberton’s madness to an end, of saving the lives of his future victims, is it worth it?

If I had an answer, I wouldn’t be asking you, journal.



41

Her arrival at the farm is relatively painless at first because she doesn’t recognize anything. It’s all so overgrown. On the drive in from Atlanta, the seas of rolling green mountains reminded her more of the grave-site tour she took right before she moved to Arizona than it did her fragmented recollections of early childhood.

By the time she and Luke reach the old chain where the entrance to the access road used to be, they’ve been trespassing for about twenty minutes. But she figures if the owners of the farm that bought up all the Bannings’ property years ago come bursting out of the trees with shotguns raised, Cole will somehow intervene.

What tipped him off? she wonders. Was it that they booked their airline tickets in their own names? Or has he been tracking Dylan’s e-mails? She figures it’s the latter.

It’s cold at this altitude, colder than it was in Atlanta. Their breath fogs the air. Luke pushes brush back with gloved hands. Someone, probably morbid hikers, and if the rumors are true, the owners of the property who lead them on guided hikes here, have beaten a trail through the brush to the front steps, where she used to sit with Abigail and watch for birds. She and Luke follow it now.

They’re several yards from the house when someone steps out onto the porch.

Dylan’s dressed like a preppy backpacker; a new-looking waffle-print coat, lightly scuffed jeans, and shiny black boots. This is how Dylan Thorpe, the privileged but kindhearted therapist she knew in Arizona would dress if he took off on a hike in a colder climate. She reminds herself not be fooled by the outfit. By the look.

He’s not Dylan Thorpe, she thinks as they stare at each other. He’s not even Dylan Cody. He’s Noah Turlington. Think of him that way, and it will be easier not to hate him. Or at the least your hatred won’t show.

He gestures for them to follow him inside.

When she first spotted the remains of the farmhouse, she assumed it had been through several fires. Now that she’s inside, she can see it’s time and weather that have eaten away at its roof and walls, leaving holes so large they look like evidence of cannon blasts. The fireplace has been conquered by a blend of vines and weeds, watered, it looks like, by a steady diet of rain. The center of the brick mantel gave way a long time ago. Below, the bricks sit where they landed, black as coal where they aren’t covered by leaves.

One entire corner of the house, including the large window from which she used to watch snow fall and birds congregate at the feeder outside, has collapsed, flooding the interior with sunlight that exposes the morbid graffiti along the walls. It’s the same bargain-basement poseur satanist crap she’s seen in pictures of the place online. Skulls, upside-down stars, crude outlines of heads she only realizes are supposed to be the devil when she finally sees the crooked horns on top. At floor level tiny altars left by the visitors line the walls. Defaced stuffed animals, some of them tied to black pillar candles. Like so many of the tributes to the Bannings that persist on the Internet, the offerings here are a crazy mishmash of grief for the victims and a perverse celebration of their killers. As if her mother and Noah’s mother weren’t claimed by maniacs, but by a dark god who demands constant reverence. She can imagine Jason Briffel crouching down in these shadows, maybe with some of his letters from Abigail tucked in his pocket, lighting one of the intact candles. This would be his church.

For her, this house, the fields outside, the entire property, is a gory delivery room where her true self was yanked from the womb by a well-armed SWAT team acting as OB-GYNs.

But what is it for Dylan?

For Noah, she corrects herself.

There are maps online that claim to show the locations where each body was buried before her rescue, so maybe he spent some time standing over his mother’s first, forced grave. If the victims were taken from an isolated location like her mother, their car was buried here, too. Even today, the most popular crime scene photos are aerial shots of the so-called automobile graveyard, where the rusted skeletons of the freshly unearthed cars looked like fossils emerging from the sands of history.

Has he never been here before?

Was he saving it for their reunion?

As they stand together inside this crumbling ruin, she feels exactly the type of kinship with him she had hoped to avoid. It’s the expression on his face as he studies these walls, she thinks. Unguarded, wide-eyed. Free of anything that looks like calculation.

Behind her, Luke stands just inside the front door, watching Dylan’s every move.

“I have something for you,” Dylan finally says.

When he extends one hand toward her, Luke takes a step, boards creaking underfoot. A link of shiny gold dangles from Dylan’s outstretched fist. She recognizes it instantly, extends her hand, gesturing with the other for Luke to stay back.

Jason Briffel’s necklace, the one he wore to her house, drops into her palm. Most of it is blackened from intense fire, the ends melted from the heat. The sight of the tiny medallion of flames, now soot covered, makes Jason’s break-in seem like minutes and not weeks ago.

“I would never have let him hurt you.”

She looks at him in disbelief. Not because she thinks he’s lying. Because she didn’t expect his candor.

“So you were outside the whole time?” she asks. “You followed me home?”

He nods.

Without thinking, she tosses the necklace toward the nearest grim altar. When his gift lands atop a rotting pile of burned offerings, Dylan flinches.

“You have every right to be angry with me.” But he doesn’t sound like he believes it, only that he thinks he should. “How much did Cole tell you about me?”

That your life hangs in my hands, she thinks. That if I refuse to keep being a guinea pig, he’ll probably shoot you dead. Right here, for all I know.

“Did he tell you that when I came to him with the first animal tests of Zypraxon, he’d squandered millions of research dollars hunting for common links between orphan diseases? That he was losing the confidence of his board and he’d only been CEO for a year. Do you know what that phrase means? Orphan disease?” She shakes her head. “It’s a disease so rare there’s no real financial incentive for a company like Graydon to find a cure for it, or even a treatment. But Cole, for some crazy reason, got it in his head that with the right amount of money and determination, and as it turned out, ignorance, he’d find some commonality between random, isolated, rare diseases and somehow develop treatments for them. His Umbrella Theory. That’s what he called it. It was complete nonsense, and he almost ruined his father’s company over it.”

“And then you came to him with a cure for something else,” she says.

“A cure?” he says. “Maybe. More like a weapon.”

“A weapon that could have saved your mother.”

“And yours.”

“And you killed four men to make it work.”