Birdy Waterman 01 - The Bone Box

deserve!” Lydia said as she stared down at the girl fighting for her life.
    “Stop! You’re killing me!” Anna Jo said, as she tried to regain her footing. Halfway up, she slipped on her own pooling blood.
    The scene was beyond frenetic. Lydia stood over Anna Jo, working the knife like a piston. Over and over. Twenty-seven times. Later, when she spoke of what she’d done, she was unsure if Anna Jo’s last words were really as she remembered them or if they had melded into some twisted fantasy of what had happened in Ponder’s cabin all those years ago.
    “Finally, got some passion,” Anna Jo said.
    Or maybe she didn’t say anything at all. She died after the second or third stab into her carotid artery.
    Lydia looked up as her husband entered the cabin.
    “Good God, what did you do, Lydia?” Jim Derby asked, his eyes terror-filled as he dropped down next to his lover.
    “I fixed your mess. Now you clean it up,” she said.
    Jim reached for Anna Jo’s blood-soaked neck for a pulse.
    “Anna Jo?” came a voice outside the cabin.
    It was Tommy.
    Jim led his now silent, almost catatonic, wife toward the back door.
    “I’ll clean up your mess, Lydia. I guess I owe you.”
    In a beat, he’d returned, pretending to see Anna Jo’s body for the first time. Tommy was crying and trying to give his girlfriend mouth to mouth. His whole body was shaking. He picked up the knife and looked at it like it was some kind of mysterious object.
    “Get out of here, and get rid of the knife. I’ll clean this up.”
    “Who did this?” Tommy said.
    The detective hooked his hand under Tommy’s armpit and lifted him to his feet.
    “Just keep your mouth shut. I’ll help you,” Jim said. “Get rid of the knife and get out of here.”
    “My husband later told me how he rearranged the crime scene. How he’d wiped away my footprints. Blamed his own on an uncharacteristic lapse in detective protocol. He called Tommy’s appearance at the cabin a gift,” Lydia said, looking at Jim. “I believe you said he was the ‘perfect patsy,’ ” she said.

    With Birdy looking on in the expansive comfort of the Derbys’ magnificent living room, Lydia was crying her heart out as she confessed to what she’d done. She was literally crumbling into pieces, but Jim “Mr. Family Man for All People” just sat there. He didn’t even try to calm his wife. Birdy wondered what he was thinking about—his political career diving into oblivion? He certainly wasn’t thinking about Lydia.
    Or Tommy.
    Or Anna Jo.
    He got up went for a desk drawer and got his gun.
    “I’ll say I thought you were an intruder,” he said, coming toward Birdy.
    “No, you won’t,” she said. She held up her cell phone. “I’ve had this on speaker. Your old friend Pat-Stan—the one you said was dead—is listening and recording this entire conversation.”
    “You asshole, Jim Derby,” came Pat-Stan’s voice over the cell phone. “I’ve already called the police—and not your bunch of deputies. The state patrol is outside now. Let’s see who has a leg to stand on in court.”

    Tommy Benjamin Freeland took his last breath a week after getting word in his Spokane hospital bed that his cousin Birdy had cleared his name. The medical staff said their patient was unable to respond verbally, but he nodded slightly and managed the briefest of smiles. They were sure he understood.
    Birdy had wanted to go see him, but a homicide case involving a high school boy in Port Orchard kept her planted in the autopsy suite. She left work when she got word of Tommy’s passing.
    Birdy wasn’t a crier, but she couldn’t stop just then. She hurried to her car and drove down the steep hill toward the water. Her mind rolled back to the boy she’d known—the one who had taught her how to fish a creek at night with a flashlight and, in one of her more disgusting lessons, how to dress a deer with only a pocket knife and a whetstone.
    She parked the Prius behind the old abandoned Beachcomber restaurant and looked out at the icy, rippling water of Sinclair Inlet. She knew that she’d done all she could. She had been so late to come to the realization that Tommy had needed her all those years. It made her sick and sad.
    Tommy, we let you down. I let you down....
    A young bald eagle, its feathers still a root beer float of brown and white, swooped down to the water and grabbed the silvery sliver of a fish. Its wings pounded the air like the loudest heartbeat imaginable