Bag of Bones

Everyone seemed sympathetic at first. The Red-Top crowd had been treated wonderfully during their time on the TR—that was what infuriated Jared the most—and I think you can forgive Son Tidwell for making a crucial mistake.”

“What mistake was that?” Why, he got the idea that Mars was heaven, I thought. The TR must have seemed like heaven to them, right up until Sara and Kito went jr a stroll, the boy carrying his berry-bucket, and never came back. It must have seemed that they’d finally jund a place where they could be black people and still be allowed to breathe.

“Thinking they’d be treated like regular folks when things went wrong, just because they’d been treated that way when things were right.

Instead, the TR clubbed together against them. No one who had an idea of what Jared and his prot6gs had done condoned it, exactly, but when the chips were down…”

“You protect your own, you wash your dirty laundry with the door closed,” Frank murmured, and finished his drink. “Yeah. By the time the Red-Tops played the Castle County Fair, their little community down by the lake had begun to break up—this is all according to Jo’s notes, you understand; there’s not a whisper of it in any of the town histories. “By Labor Day the active harassment had started—so Royce told Jo. It got a little uglier every day—a little scarier—but Son Tidwell flat didn’t want to go, not until he found out what had happened to his sister and nephew. He apparently kept the blood family there in the meadow even after the others had taken off for friendlier locations. “Then someone laid the trap. There was a clearing in the woods about a mile east of what’s now called Tidwell’s Meadow; it had a big birch cross in the middle of it. Jo had a picture of it in her studio. That was where the black community had their services after the doors of the local churches were closed to them. The boy—Junior—used to go up there a lot to pray or just to sit and meditate. There were plenty of folks in the township who knew his routine. Someone put a leghold trap on the little path through the woods that the boy used.

Covered it with leaves and needles.”

“Jesus,” Frank said. He sounded ill. “Probably it wasn’t Jared Devore or his logger-boys who set it, either—they didn’t want any more to do with Sara and Son’s people after the murders, they kept right clear of them. It might not even have been a friend of those boys. By then they didn’t have that many friends. But that didn’t change the fact that those folks down by the lake were getting out of their place, scratching at things better left alone, refusing to take no for an answer. So someone set the trap. I don’t think there was any intent to actually kill the boy, but to maim him?

Maybe see him with his foot off, condemned to a lifetime crutch? I think they may have gotten that far in their imagining.

“In any case it worked. The boy stepped in the trap… and for quite awhile they didn’t find him. The pain must have been excruciating. Then the blood-poisoning. He died. Son gave up. He had other kids to think about, not to mention the people who’d stuck with him. They packed up their clothes and their guitars and left. Jo traced some of them to North Carolina, where many of the descendants still live. And during the fires of 1933, the ones young Max Devore set, the cabins burned flat”

“I don’t understand why the bodies of Sara and her son weren’t found,” Frank said. “I understand that what you smelled—the putres-cence-wasn’t there in any physical sense. But surely at the time… if this path you call The Street was so popular…”

“Devore and the others didn’t bury them where I found them, not to begin with. They would have started by dragging the bodies deeper into the woods—maybe up to where the north wing of Sara Laughs stands now. They covered them with brush and came back that night. Must have been that night; to leave them any longer would have drawn every carnivore in the woods. They took them someplace else and buried them in that roll of canvas. Jo didn’t know where, but my guess is Bowie Ridge, where they’d spent most of the summer cutting.

Hell, Bowie Ridge is still pretty isolated. They put the bodies somewhere; we might as well say there.”

“Then how… why…”

“Draper Fi

But the boys had bad dreams, they drank too much, they fought too much, they argued… bristled if anyone so much as mentioned the Red-Tops…”

“Might as well have gone around wearing signs reading: ICK US, WE’re GUILTY,” Frank commented. “Yes. It probably didn’t help that most of the TR was giving them the silent treatment. Then Fi

“Did Jared go along with the idea?”

“According to Jo’s notes, by then they never went near him. They reburied the bag of bones—without Jared Devore’s help—where I eventually dug it up. In the late fall or early winter of 1902, I think.”

“She wanted to be back, didn’t she? Sara. Back where she could really work on them.”

“And on the whole township. Yes. Jo thought so, too. Enough so she didn’t want to go back to Sara Laughs once she found some of this stuff out. Especially when she guessed she was pregnant.

When we started trying to have a baby and I suggested the name Kia, how that must have scared her! And I never saw.”

“Sara thought she could use you to kill Kyra if Devore played out before he could get the job done—he was old and in bad health, after all. Jo gambled that you’d save her instead. That’s what you think, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And she was right.”

“I couldn’t have done it alone. From the night I dreamed about Sara singing, Jo was with me every step of the way. Sara couldn’t make her quit.”

“No, she wasn’t a quitter,” Frank agreed, and wiped at one eye. “What do you know about your twice-great-aunt? The one that married Auster?”

“Bridget Noonan Auster,” I said. “Bridey, to her friends. I asked my mother and she swears up and down she knows nothing, that Jo never asked her about Bridey, but I think she might be lying. The young woman was definitely the black sheep of the family—I can tell just by the sound of Mom’s voice when the name comes up. I have no idea how she met Benton Auster. Let’s say he was down in the Prout’s Neck part of the world visiting friends and started flirting with her at a clambake.

That’s as likely as anything else. This was in 1884. She was eighteen, he was twenty-three. They got married, one of those hurry-up jobs.

Harry, the one who actually drowned Kito Tidwell, came along six months later.”

“So he was barely seventeen when it happened,” Frank said. “Great God.”

“And by then his mother had gotten religion. His terror over what she’d think if she ever found out was part of the reason he did what he did.

Any other questions, Frank? Because I’m really starting to fade.” For several moments he said nothing—I had begun to think he was done when he said, “Two others. Do you mind?”

“I guess it’s too late to back out now. What are they?”

“The Shape you spoke of. The Outsider. That troubles me.” I said nothing. It troubled me, too. “Do you think there’s a chance it might come back?”

“It always does,” I said. “At the risk of sounding pompous, the Outsider eventually comes back for all of us, doesn’t it? Because we’re all bags of bones. And the Outsider. · Frank, the Outsider wants what’s in the bag.” He mulled this over, then swallowed the rest of his Scotch at a gulp. “You had one other question?”