Birdy Waterman 01 - The Bone Box

then there was only one place to go. Back home.

C HAPTER F IVE
    “I know who you are why you are here.”
    Anna Jo Bonners’s mother stood on the front steps of her house and faced Birdy Waterman with ice-pellet eyes. Carmona Bonner was a woman who, as Birdy recalled, seldom smiled. She had the kind of humorless face that owed more to the fact that she’d lost one of her front teeth in a car accident than to what kind of person she really was. She simply never smiled. After Anna Jo’s murder, few thought she had many reasons to anyway.
    Birdy braced herself against the chill by wrapping her arms around her chest. “My cousin is dying and I’m just trying to tie up some loose ends,” she said.
    “My daughter is dead and there are no more loose ends,” Carmona said.
    Birdy persisted. “May I come inside? Chilly out here.”
    Mrs. Bonners stood her ground. “No,” she said. “You should have put on an extra sweater. Always cold up here this time of year. Maybe you’ve forgotten, living in the big city.”
    The remark was almost laughable. No one who visited Port Orchard would have considered it a big town, much less a major city.
    “Really is cold out here,” Birdy said, letting her teeth chatter for effect and because the chilly ocean air was pummeling her. A curl of wood smoke coming from the chimney indicated that there was no need to suffer on that stoop.
    Carmona Bonners sighed and reluctantly opened the door. “Come in,” she said. “But you can only stay a minute and you have to stay on the linoleum. I just cleaned the carpets.”
    She shut the door and the two stood in the miniscule foyer. A photograph of a group of Makahs huddled next to a whale carcass dominated the space. It wasn’t a particularly old image. Despite outcries from environmentalists and organizations like PETA, the Makahs had established their continuing right to hunt for whales off the coast of Washington. They had done so only once in modern times.
    “Mrs. Bonners, I really only want to know one thing and I think you might be able to help me. Something has troubled me over the years.”
    The woman regarded her visitor warily. “I guess you were probably traumatized too. Not as much as we were. But seeing Tommy Freeland right after he did what he did to our Anna Jo must have been bad. Like I said, not like us at all, but hard I guess.”
    “Yes, it was,” Birdy said. “I don’t even like bringing it up. Just thinking about it all these years makes my heart break for you and your family.”
    “Thank you, but that’s not why you’re here. I heard it through the grapevine that you’re trying to clear his name.”
    The grapevine on the reservation was more powerful than a satellite receiver. “It isn’t so much that,” Birdy said. “I don’t know what happened, but one thing that troubles me is all the violence against Anna Jo. They called it a rage killing. I don’t know what Tommy would have been so mad about.”
    “Trust me,” Carmona said, “he was mad. Do you need me to spell out what he did to her?”
    There was no use suggesting that Tommy wasn’t the killer. The focus had to be on gathering information and understanding. Not promoting something she wasn’t even sure about.
    “I guess so,” Birdy said. “What was it?”
    Carmona glanced through the window as a pair of headlights slowly meandered by. “You better go now. Let’s just let sleeping dogs lie,” she said.
    Birdy wasn’t ready. She wanted, needed some answers. “Didn’t he love Anna Jo?”
    “He said he did,” she said, her words emphasizing the word “he” in a strange way. Birdy asked the victim’s mother what she meant.
    “Look, I know you have respect for our people,” Carmona said, her voice whistling a little through the gap in her front teeth. “I know you haven’t completely forgotten where you came from, so let’s just leave it at that. Let’s let Anna Jo be. Let her live in our memories as she was—not as you’d have her.”
    Carmona opened the door and held it for Birdy to pass. Birdy put her hand on the doorjamb to buy a moment more of conversation.
    “Anna Jo didn’t love Tommy, did she?”
    “Good-bye, Dr. Waterman. Let my daughter rest in peace.”

C HAPTER S IX
    It had been a quiet day in the Kitsap County Morgue, which meant it had been a good day. No one who worked there ever cursed their jobs because there was “nothing to do.” An empty chiller meant a day without carrying the hurt of someone