Ethel is James’s 1969 El Camino. She’s old, moody, and so ugly she’s beautiful. I love the sound her engine makes—the mean, sexy rumble that turns heads on warm spring nights when we drive past the stretch of outdoor restaurant patios along Brookside. Last year, before James told his dad he was asexual and his dad stopped looking him in the eye, the two of them had rebuilt Ethel from the wheels up. They were always doing stuff like that: taking fishing trips, driving to small towns in the Panhandle to drum together at Kiowa powwows and dances. Those days were long gone, but at least James still had Ethel. The nose-in-the-air types at our private school can trash-talk him all they want for being a scholarship student, but Ethel is and always will be completely badass.
That morning, he parked Ethel behind my Acura and sauntered toward me calmly, like I hadn’t just called him in a complete panic.
“Nice look,” he said.
I was still wearing the bike shorts and Tulsa Roughnecks T-shirt I’d slept in. My breath was rank, and my hair was sticking out all over the place even though I’d pressed it the day before. Not that James had a lot of room to talk; his own hair was cut into a tight fade on the sides, but it was high on top, and so flattened and messy that I knew he hadn’t stopped to comb it.
Which I appreciated, because James is more than slightly obsessive about his appearance. He’s this six-foot-four, part-Kiowa, part-black guy with crazy broad shoulders, a Willy-Wonka-goes-to-Wall-Street wardrobe, and more skin care products in his bathroom than Mom and I have combined. In other words, it was a big deal for him to leave the house ungroomed. I gave him shit anyway, to distract myself from the situation and make things feel more normal.
“Nice hair.”
His hand went halfway to his head and stopped.
“Uh-uh,” he said. “Only one of us gets to be bitchy this early in the morning and I’ve got dibs. Now, tell me what’s going on.”
So much for normal.
“Come see what I found,” I said.
“You gonna tell me what it is?”
I shook my head. “You’ll see.”
At the door to the back house, James whistled long and low over the mess. “They tore this place up!”
“Tim and Isis Chase never do anything half-assed,” I said.
We stopped at the edge of the hole and stared down together. James talked first.
“Did you call the police?”
“No. I thought maybe the construction guys would do it. But it doesn’t look like they did.”
“You mean they just left?”
“Yeah.”
James sighed, like he had a few thoughts on the matter. But after a pause, all he said was, “Who do you think it is?”
It was such a simple question, but somehow I knew the answer was going to be anything but. I got down on my knees to look closer. With my living, breathing best friend at my side, the existential awfulness of an abandoned dead person was a lot easier to take. Bones were just bones, after all. Unless they were something more.
I reached toward the tarp. “Haven’t got a clue,” I said. “Let’s figure it out.”
James grabbed my arm. “Don’t touch it!”
“It’s been dead a long time,” I said, getting braver by the second. “I think I’m safe.”
James nudged my hip with the toe of his oxford. “I know. But you’re the murder mystery fangirl. Aren’t you supposed to leave crime scenes intact for the police?”
“It’s skeletonized,” I said, showing off my fangirl vocab. “And it looks like it’s been here forever. My guess is, anyone who might have been looking for this guy is dead, too.”
“Well, it’s still nasty, and you shouldn’t touch it,” he said, making a face.
“Yeah. You’re probably right.”
I yanked up a corner of the tarp. The top layer came loose with a thrip. Underneath was cleaner fabric that didn’t give so easy. I worked my fingers into the ground by where the hip bone should have been, found a loose-ish edge, and squatted on my toes so I could put all my weight into pulling. It gave. I fell backwards, hitting the ground hard enough to raise a cloud of dust. Once James and I recovered from our coughing fits, we looked down at the exposed body together.
“I bet that’s blood,” I said, pointing to a heavy spatter of brown on the yellowed shirt that must have been white once.
James nodded. “It’s on the pants, too.” He shifted closer to the hole. “Wait… is that a gun?”
I saw the half-buried lump of dull metal he was talking about, got on my knees, and pulled it free of the hard-packed dirt.
“What’s that?” he asked.
I set the pistol down on the intact floorboards. “Like you said, it’s a gun.”
“No.” He pointed to a rusty patch on the barrel. “That.”
It looked like there was something carved into the metal. And even though I knew better than to get my own DNA and fingerprints all over the thing, I hawked a glob of spit onto the rust and rubbed. It didn’t do any good; neither one of us could make out the mark.
“Maybe it’s the owner’s name,” James said.
“Or the gun’s.”
“You think?”
I’d been squinting and had to blink a few times to make my eyes focus normally. “Could be. Cowboys always name their rifles in old westerns, don’t they?”
James shrugged and turned the gun over. The other side was covered in white gunk.
“I think that’s lime,” I said. “You know—to keep the body from smelling.”
He scratched at it until a big flake fell off. There was no rust underneath, and no mistaking what we saw: eight notches, carved deep.
“Somebody was keeping count,” I said.
James nodded. “You think it was the skeleton, or the person who dumped it here?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “But I’m guessing whoever killed this guy wasn’t interested in bragging about it. They wanted him erased, like he never even existed.”
“That’s dark, Chase.”
“Welcome to my morning.”
Then I noticed thin cracks spiderwebbing out from the hank of matted hair on the back of the skull. I curled my fingers under its edge, scraping until the whole mess came off in my hand. The bone underneath was shattered.
“That’s not from a bullet,” James muttered. He reached down past the edge of the hole and came out holding a brick. One of its long edges was stained dark, covered with strands of something that looked suspiciously like hair. He held that edge over the crater in the skull. It fit perfectly along the main fracture line. Warm as the air around me had gotten, I shivered.
James set the brick down and reached in again. “There’s something in his back pocket…”
The gate clicked outside.
James jerked back and scrambled to his feet. I dropped onto my stomach and had just gotten hold of the thing in the skeleton’s pocket when James yanked me out by the waist. He kicked the gun and the brick back into the hole. I shoved a mildewed rectangle of leather between the waistband of my bike shorts and the skin of my back.
“Keep quiet,” I whispered as a shadow crossed the yard. “I’ll do the talking.”