Read Online The Bone Thief: A Body Farm Novel-5 by Jefferson Bass - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Jefferson Bass
Tags: Fiction, General, thriller, Suspense, Thrillers, Mystery & Detective, American Mystery & Suspense Fiction, Mystery, Forensic anthropologists, Mystery And Suspense Fiction, Fiction - Espionage, Brockton; Bill (Fictitious character), Crime laboratories, Radiation victims
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roads—all tracks—lead me back to Isabella?
The stairwell door slammed again, jarring me back to the present and to Culpepper once more. I took another M&M from the beaker—green this time. Culpepper reached in and took one as well, a yellow.
“Okay, I gotta go.” He raised the M&M as if it were a tiny drink and he were proposing a toast. “To finding the tracks before they’re swept away.” Then he tossed the candy straight up, catching it in his mouth as it arced down. “And to not going off the deep end.”
He closed the stairwell door gently on his way out. I let the green M&M dissolve slowly in my mouth, feeling the wall of denial I’d erected around Isabella’s memory melt and crumble like the hard candy shell.
CHAPTER 8
I STARED AT THE SMALL DIGITAL RECORDER IN MY hand, paralyzed by the countless unspoken questions it posed, questions to which I had no answers. I was as paralyzed by the machine as I’d been by the man who’d loaned it to me: a Knoxville psychologist named John Hoover, highly recommended by my family physician. I’d phoned him for an appointment several weeks earlier, in hopes he could help me sort through some confusion and sadness. In doing so I was heeding the advice Miranda had given me, when she’d said to “take a sabbatical, write a book, see a therapist, get a dog—do whatever will help you heal.” Seeing a therapist had struck me as more efficient than the sabbatical or writing options and as less work (and probably less expense) than the dog option. But sitting in his office, I’d spent forty-five of my allotted fifty-minute session avoiding the real reason I’d come. I’d chattered about my work and about my past, but not about my present or my pain—not about Isabella.
As the final minutes of the session ticked away, Dr. Hoover rose from his overstuffed chair, walked to his desk, and took out a small audio recorder. “Here,” he said. “Maybe it would be easier to start by speaking what’s on your mind into this. You don’t have to share it with me; you can just erase it afterward if you want. But putting words to whatever’s troubling you—naming the parts, telling the story of your sadness—might help you get a handle on it.”
Now, at midnight, sitting in darkness in my living room, I realized I’d been staring at the recorder for forty-five minutes. Did that mean I had only five more minutes in the session with my digital therapist?
Summoning up my nerve, I pressed “record” and began to speak.
NOW IS THE TIME FORall good men to come to the aid of their country. I hate this. I don’t know what to say. I feel like a blackmailer whispering into this thing. How do I tell the story of my sadness? Right now that would be the story of Isabella. But where do I begin the story, and how? Do I begin the day I met Isabella? The day I walked into the Oak Ridge Public Library and she asked if she could help me? Do I begin with the World War II photos she showed me, the ones that helped me find the buried bones of a murdered soldier? Or do I go all the way back to the war itself, the race to build the Bomb, the relentless momentum to drop it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Do I begin that day in August of 1945, when a B-29 took off from the island of Tinian, crossed a thousand miles of the Pacific, and destroyed the city where Isabella’s parents lived? No. That would be her story of sadness, not mine, not ours.
Did our story begin the night we ate pizza and I walked her partway home and listened to the wind sighing in the treetops and felt the urge to kiss her? Or did it begin the night she came to my house bringing a DVD ofDr. Strangeloveand microwave popcorn and Coke? Perhaps it began the moment she pressed herself against me, took me into her arms, and gave herself to me. But what can I say about her? That she was beautiful? She was. She still is, if she’s alive. Exotically beautiful, but in a way that was too subtle to pinpoint. One of her four
The stairwell door slammed again, jarring me back to the present and to Culpepper once more. I took another M&M from the beaker—green this time. Culpepper reached in and took one as well, a yellow.
“Okay, I gotta go.” He raised the M&M as if it were a tiny drink and he were proposing a toast. “To finding the tracks before they’re swept away.” Then he tossed the candy straight up, catching it in his mouth as it arced down. “And to not going off the deep end.”
He closed the stairwell door gently on his way out. I let the green M&M dissolve slowly in my mouth, feeling the wall of denial I’d erected around Isabella’s memory melt and crumble like the hard candy shell.
CHAPTER 8
I STARED AT THE SMALL DIGITAL RECORDER IN MY hand, paralyzed by the countless unspoken questions it posed, questions to which I had no answers. I was as paralyzed by the machine as I’d been by the man who’d loaned it to me: a Knoxville psychologist named John Hoover, highly recommended by my family physician. I’d phoned him for an appointment several weeks earlier, in hopes he could help me sort through some confusion and sadness. In doing so I was heeding the advice Miranda had given me, when she’d said to “take a sabbatical, write a book, see a therapist, get a dog—do whatever will help you heal.” Seeing a therapist had struck me as more efficient than the sabbatical or writing options and as less work (and probably less expense) than the dog option. But sitting in his office, I’d spent forty-five of my allotted fifty-minute session avoiding the real reason I’d come. I’d chattered about my work and about my past, but not about my present or my pain—not about Isabella.
As the final minutes of the session ticked away, Dr. Hoover rose from his overstuffed chair, walked to his desk, and took out a small audio recorder. “Here,” he said. “Maybe it would be easier to start by speaking what’s on your mind into this. You don’t have to share it with me; you can just erase it afterward if you want. But putting words to whatever’s troubling you—naming the parts, telling the story of your sadness—might help you get a handle on it.”
Now, at midnight, sitting in darkness in my living room, I realized I’d been staring at the recorder for forty-five minutes. Did that mean I had only five more minutes in the session with my digital therapist?
Summoning up my nerve, I pressed “record” and began to speak.
NOW IS THE TIME FORall good men to come to the aid of their country. I hate this. I don’t know what to say. I feel like a blackmailer whispering into this thing. How do I tell the story of my sadness? Right now that would be the story of Isabella. But where do I begin the story, and how? Do I begin the day I met Isabella? The day I walked into the Oak Ridge Public Library and she asked if she could help me? Do I begin with the World War II photos she showed me, the ones that helped me find the buried bones of a murdered soldier? Or do I go all the way back to the war itself, the race to build the Bomb, the relentless momentum to drop it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Do I begin that day in August of 1945, when a B-29 took off from the island of Tinian, crossed a thousand miles of the Pacific, and destroyed the city where Isabella’s parents lived? No. That would be her story of sadness, not mine, not ours.
Did our story begin the night we ate pizza and I walked her partway home and listened to the wind sighing in the treetops and felt the urge to kiss her? Or did it begin the night she came to my house bringing a DVD ofDr. Strangeloveand microwave popcorn and Coke? Perhaps it began the moment she pressed herself against me, took me into her arms, and gave herself to me. But what can I say about her? That she was beautiful? She was. She still is, if she’s alive. Exotically beautiful, but in a way that was too subtle to pinpoint. One of her four
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