(Author’s note: I have changed Ron’s name to Gabe.)
V
A booming thunderclap rattled the windows and shook the house. They found themselves in a downpour on the ride home with the storm lying low for the rest of the evening only to re-ignite at three in the morning. Ben jerked awake and sat up quickly, expecting to hear, “Corpsman up!” His heart pounded and the sweat began to flow; just when he thought he had such knee-jerk reactions under control, he was ambushed all over again.
From the other room, Molly squawked and spouted off a rapid succession of words in protest to the rumble. He blamed himself for not doing a better job of concealing his own neurosis to the bright flashes of lightning and the bellowing thunder. Like any good parent, he hoped his emotional scars would go unnoticed but he knew, given how attuned to feelings Molly was, it was inevitable he would not only repeat words she heard but reflect his own set of emotions.
“I’m coming girl.”
One trait she did not pick up, and only because she was not in Ben’s bedroom when he woke, was taking a quick, reassuring glance for any insurgent that might have embedded himself into the room while he slept. His look was swift and nonchalant, an effort to fool even himself in thinking that he wasn’t really going through the motion. But, he knew that if Molly were with him every morning, before long, she would be making the casual sweep as well. On cue, he did so now as he stepped down from his bed, glancing furtively into the dark corners of his room.
As soon as Ben stepped out into the living area, Molly greeted him with another long series of rambling words and screeches, giving voice to the angst that churned silently inside of him.
“Didn’t like that, did you?”
He turned on a floor lamp that bathed the room in a soft, amber light that helped neutralize the stark flashes from outside. Even without the lightning, it was an ambience they both found very soothing. Ben wasn’t quite sure if Molly just took on his likes or if it was more that they were soul mates and happened to gravitate to the same preferences; his inclination leaned heavily toward the latter.
He opened the cage and she wasted no time leaping to the entrance and onto his arm. They simultaneously leaned toward one another and exchanged a mouth to beak kiss.
“Hey, sweetie.”
“Hey, sweetie,” she replied.
Another bright flash lit up the room followed by another house clattering boom. Ben ducked, quickly collapsing into a squat causing Molly to spread her wings and dig her claws into his arm.
“Dammit!” he muttered
“Dammit!” Molly repeated, quickly climbing up his arm to rest on his shoulder.
Even before he purchased Molly, in anticipation of her arrival as he waited for her to be completely weaned, Ben worked on cleaning up his vocabulary. Not that he was a fountain of colorful words but enough still found their way into his speech so that he wanted to watch his step just as if he was around children. But “dammit” hung tenaciously on, being his default phrase in a stressed situation.
“Yeah. It’s okay, girl.”
Inspecting his arm, he wasn’t surprised that she had drawn blood. Being a hyacinth, the largest of the macaws, meant she also had the most powerful beak of her species and the most lethal of claws. Yet, she managed to be incredibly gentle with her fierce weaponry and he knew the wounds on his arm could have been much, much worse. She gently nibbled at his ear with her open beak and he responded by stroking her deep blue belly; she had him well-trained and thanked him by rubbing her head up and down against the side of his face. He studied his arm once more and dabbed at the scratches with a napkin, letting that suffice for his first-aid. Now that he was up at that un-godly hour, the events from yesterday gnawed at him and he was eager to follow up.
From a cabinet he pulled out an ammo box and placed it on the kitchen table. He learned long ago that if he had anything he valued to securely store it away from Molly’s reach. Tucked away in a cabinet was not enough as she could easily open the door. While the metal ammo containers were not foolproof, they would at least thwart her long enough for him to get wind of what she was up to. He placed the box on the table, opened it and peered at the skeletal hand inside. The gun and the bullets were in another box in the same cabinet.
“No touch,” he said, for whatever it was worth.
Molly cocked her head and repeated “no touch,” while craning to get a better look in the box and eyeing the bones a bit too enthusiastically for Ben’s liking.
“Here,” he said, pulling an eighteen inch length of two by four from a barrel full of various pieces of wood and placing it on the table. “Have a go at that.”
For the most part, the chunks of wood kept her well occupied. But the instinctive desire to chew on objects sometimes got the better of her and her handiwork was evident throughout the house. The distressed furniture look was very much in vogue, Ben would remind visitors. She squawked and stayed put on his shoulder, uninterested in his current offering.
“How about some music?” Molly said, just moments before the words were about to leave Ben’s mouth. He was in the mood for some mellow country but that wasn’t her cup of tea.
“Classical?”
She dipped her neck and did a little up and down dance with her head.
“All right.”
“All right,” she repeated.
He chose a piano nocturne that was one of her favorites, especially when she seemed stressed. The same piece he played often in Iraq for the very same reason and for which he took a lot of ribbing from his fellow corpsmen. Being black and listening to classical music seemed incongruous to them; listening to country music didn’t fare much better of a response.
“Chopin.”
“Chopin,” he repeated.
The music helped take the edge of the remnants of lightning and low thunder that still made its way into the room. Ben entertained the idea of smoking a joint but he wasn’t about to leave Molly to go out on the porch and, because of her, lighting one up inside was definitely out of the question. And, besides, work was calling. He settled for a beer.
With a bottle in one hand and a small bowl of strawberries in the other, he walked back to the table and placed the bowl down. Molly hopped down to enjoy her favorite fruit. Watching her eat, he was glad that yesterday, on their ride back, Gabe had suggested to drop Max off at the vet to have him checked out, vaccinated and bathed with a flea dip before bringing him home. He wondered what the heck he was thinking wanting to bring a dog into the house. At almost three feet long, Molly was quite the adversary, but, still, the last he heard, dogs ate birds. Maybe he would Google macaws and dogs to see what came up but, at the moment, he was ready to nix the whole dog thing.
Ben picked up the hand and placed it once again in his open palm. He had looked at it earlier before going to bed but, by the time he had fed Gabe dinner, cleaned him up for the night and transferred him into bed, Ben was too tired for tackling any riddles, including wondering if the two bullets missing from the gun chamber were lodged in the skeleton. He took another swig of his beer, bent over, looking more closely, remembering something about spaces between the joints in a child’s hand, the bones not being fully fused.
With hand in hand, he walked over to the computer desk; Molly picked up a strawberry in her beak, hopped down from the table and followed him. The computer hummed to life and, while waiting, he looked out the window towards Gabe’s house and saw that a light on in the den. It had to be Beth who could be up for a number of reasons relating to Gabe, the top three being he was either too hot, too cold or having a nightmare. Or, maybe, she too was up because of the storm and unable to go back to sleep. His gaze kept lingering out the window even after the computer was fully booted, picturing Beth sitting in her lounger, not happy by the new cards she had been dealt these past ten months. Ben knew that she and Gabe had talked about a separation before his accident but that was now put on an indefinite hold.
Molly tugged at his pajama leg and brought his attention back to the computer. He placed his arm down, let Molly hop on and she crawled up to his shoulder where she liked to perch when Ben was working. She sat, staring intently, as if waiting to see where his late night search was about to take them.
“Here we go,” he said, after sifting through a few sites.
“See? Look at that.” He pointed to the screen at dark areas between the joints of a child’s skeletal hand. “That’s cartilage. And, here. On this adult hand,” he said as he scrolled the screen down, “it’s solid. The cartilage has turned to bone.”
Molly squawked, as if in agreement.
Ben picked up the skeleton.
“I think this is definitely an adult, Molly.”
From his shoulder, she bent down, and tried to reach it with her open beak.
“No.”
He looked up out the window and towards the den light that was still on. Off to the right was Gabe’s room which remained dark.
“Well, at least he’s not a child killer.”
Not that Ben thought he was. But, the fact remained that there was a skeleton in some brambles with Gabe’s gun nearby all lying a quarter of a mile away from where he had a bike accident. There probably was a perfectly reasonable explanation which forensics could quickly sort out. But, Gabe’s run-in with the DA two years back did not bode well for a judicious account being reached. Gabe and the District Attorney had butted heads over gun rights and carrying a concealed weapon and after fifteen rounds Gabe came out the victor on a technicality. The DA was not happy and Ben was sure he would have a field day with this scenario. Quadriplegic or not, the DA would probably try to make Gabe’s life as miserable as possible, as if it wasn’t a fairly close second to that at the moment.
Ben wanted to talk with Gabe yesterday about everything he found down in the creek bed, but everyone was beat and Gabe was really having trouble concentrating. Mornings were the best time to communicate with Gabe when he was well rested and feeling the least amount of pain. Of course, the fact that Gabe remembered nothing from that day created quite a challenge. In the meantime, Ben thought he would do some research and maybe come up with something that might be of use when they talked.
Molly nibbled on his ear again, but this time, instead of seeking a belly rub, she seemed to be trying to re-focus Ben’s attention to the computer.
“Hey,” he quietly muttered as he gave her a quick rub before dedicating both hands to the keyboard. He searched for missing persons from ten months back and clicked on an FBI link that filled the screen with thumbnail portraits of faces ranging in age from toddlers to men in their sixties with every race, gender and age in between. Some of the missing went back more than fifteen years. The ones that made Ben’s hair stand on end were those who’s missing date were within the past month or two, as if they were just standing next to him a moment ago and then, just like that, they vanished. Just like in combat, life suddenly disappeared, he was reminded all too easily. The eyes, the smiles, all those faces. Ben was taken aback by the number of photos. Again ambushed.
He clicked on a young attractive looking woman with straight blonde hair. She looked even prettier in the full-sized shot and his heart skipped a beat when he saw the “last seen” date – almost exactly a year ago. Could he have been that lucky – was lucky the right word? – to have stumbled upon the identity of the remains that quickly? Reading further, she was last seen in a state that was several hundred miles away and her shoe was found on the side of the road. That wouldn’t fit…or would it? He assumed that he needed to look for a missing person from the area, but a woman could have easily hitched or traveled down from another state. Or, Gabe could have met the woman out of state and…It seemed too preposterous. Why was he even pursuing this line of thinking? Ben prided himself in his ability to read a person. It seldom failed him and he felt he knew Gabe. Still…
He went back to the thumbnails, looked at the pictures again and then at the hand on the desk. He shook his head in dismay at the assumptions he was allowing himself to fall prey. That was his other characteristic that not only served him well but saved his life and the life of others over in Iraq; never assume anything. Yet, here he was assuming that the skeleton was female. The hand, and what he saw of the lower arm bones, seemed slight and thin. A quick search of the skeleton web sites revealed that it was virtually impossible to differentiate between male and female from a hand, the radius or ulna. If he really wanted to determine the sex of the skeletal hand in front of him, he would have to dig up the pelvis, and even that wasn’t a hundred per cent guarantee.
Ben opened a new window and entered Gabe Hartnett. This wasn’t the first time he Googled Gabe. When offered the job ten months earlier, Ben wanted to have a good idea who he would be so intimately involved with on a daily bases. As happened on his search the first time, Gabby Hartnett, the legendary catcher for the Chicago Cubs in the 1930s, occupied the top line. Gabe’s dad was a huge fan of the Cubs and was thrilled to share the same last name as the star catcher. As Gabe told the story, his dad couldn’t wait to marry and have a son so he could name the offspring Gabby, but his wife wouldn’t go for it so they comprised on Gabe. The most prized possession of his father’s was a baseball glove autographed by Gabby Hartnett which Gabe still had. It was mounted in a glass case that hung on the wall next to a photograph of Hartnett signing a baseball for Al Capone, the same photograph Ben was looking at on the computer; it was hard to tell who was more intrigued with whom. Further down on the screen, another link caught Ben’s eye.
“Huh. Look at this, Molly.”
She leaned in and gave a playful touch of her open beak against his face.
Ben clicked on a Gabe Harnett, missing the middle “t’, that had been murdered three years ago.
“I didn’t see this last time.”
The murdered Gabe was only twenty-one and the death was drug related. There was an eerie quality staring at the young man, as if somehow this was Gabe’s alter ego, a life of Gabe’s that was waiting to emerge. Even more chilling was the fact that the murdered Gabe was also from Chicago.
Ben moved on to links related to the Gabe Hartnett living next door. Most articles cited his arrest and trial of the gun charges. He perused through them to see if there was anything he may have missed the first time around, something that gave a deeper insight into his past. Nothing stood out. His wishful thinking had him hoping to stumble across a link that would reveal any affairs Gabe had and listing all the women with whom he had been involved; the only list of adulterers were limited to famous people.
As expected, there was no link that revealed Gabe’s work as a software developer for the military. Ben had only learned of that after he started working for him. Nothing especially hush-hush about it, Gabe explained; mostly efficiency software that helped move shipments of all sorts from one place to another in the shortest amount of time. But, when Ben asked him further details, Gabe moved on to another subject as if suddenly realizing that he breached a privacy agreement. It was easy to do, Ben thought. Every quadriplegic he knew was on a slew of drugs and a loose tongue was hard to control.
With some effort, Ben did find a link tying him to the work that made Gabe independently wealthy. After contracting with the government, he turned to the private sector developing software that coordinated elevator cars in large office buildings and hotels. Instead of just pressing the up or down button, a person pressed the floor he wanted to go to and a read-out flashed which car the person should take; it cut waiting by at least fifty percent. Simple, but brilliant. Though, not flashy enough to warrant an easy find when Googling Gabe Hartnett.
All very interesting, Ben thought, but getting him nowhere. He went back to missing persons and searched within the state at a different link. Another page of smiling faces who were missing for years and years to just a few days ago. And then, just shy of ten months. Last seen the day before Gabe’s accident. A young woman. Twenty-six. Alexa Brantley. From the very same friggin town.
He rolled the name around in his mind. “Alexa Brantley,” he said softly, repeating it silently while the name tumbled inside and clanged against the walls of his braincase.
“Holy shit,” he found himself muttering again in less than twenty-four hours.
“Holy shit,” Molly repeated.
Copyright © 2012 Philip Zweig
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