City Of Bones

glanced at Edgar and then back at the woman. Her anger had turned the tan on her sculptured face uneven. There were blotches beginning to form, the tell of plastic surgery.
    “Mrs. Waters, sit down,” Bosch said sternly. “Please try to relax.”
    “Relax? Do you know who I am? My husband built this place. The houses, the golf course, everything. You can’t just come in here like this. I could pick up the phone and have the chief of police on the line in two-”
    “Your son is dead, lady,” Edgar snapped. “The one you left behind thirty years ago. So sit down and let us ask you our questions.”
    She dropped back onto the couch as if her feet had been kicked out from beneath her. Her mouth opened and then closed. Her eyes were no longer on them, they were on some distant memory.
    “Arthur…”
    “That’s right,” Edgar said. “Arthur. Glad you at least remember it.”
    They watched her in silence for a few moments. All the years and all the distance wasn’t enough. She was hurt by the news. Hurt bad. Bosch had seen it before. The past had a way of coming back up out of the ground. Always right below your feet.
    Bosch took his notebook out of his pocket and opened it to a blank page. He wrote “Cool it” on it and handed the notebook to Edgar.
    “Jerry, why don’t you take some notes? I think Mrs. Waters wants to cooperate with us.”
    His speaking drew Christine Waters out of her blue reverie. She looked at Bosch.
    “What happened? Was it Sam?”
    “We don’t know. That’s why we’re here. Arthur has been dead a long time. His remains were found just last week.”
    She slowly brought one of her hands to her mouth in a fist. She lightly started bumping it against her lips.
    “How long?”
    “He had been buried for twenty years. It was a call from your daughter that helped us identify him.”
    “Sheila.”
    It was as if she had not spoken the name in so long she had to try it out to see if it still worked.
    “Mrs. Waters, Arthur disappeared in nineteen eighty. Did you know about that?”
    She shook her head.
    “I was gone. I left almost ten years before that.”
    “And you had no contact with your family at all?”
    “I thought…”
    She didn’t finish. Bosch waited.
    “Mrs. Waters?”
    “I couldn’t take them with me. I was young and couldn’t handle… the responsibility. I ran away. I admit that. I ran away. I thought that it would be best for them to not hear from me, to not even know about me.”
    Bosch nodded in a way he hoped conveyed that he understood and agreed with her thinking at the time. It didn’t matter that he did not. It didn’t matter that his own mother had faced the same hardship of having a child too soon and under difficult circumstances but had clung to and protected him with a fierceness that inspired his life.
    “You wrote them letters before you left? Your children, I mean.”
    “How did you know that?”
    “Sheila told us. What did you say in the letter to Arthur?”
    “I just… I just told him I loved him and I’d always think about him, but I couldn’t be with him. I can’t really remember everything I said. Is it important?”
    Bosch shrugged his shoulders.
    “I don’t know. Your son had a letter with him. It might have been the one from you. It’s deteriorated. We probably won’t ever know. In the divorce petition you filed a few years after leaving home, you cited physical abuse as a cause of action. I need you to tell us about that. What was the physical abuse?”
    She shook her head again, this time in a dismissive way, as if the question was annoying or stupid.
    “What do you think? Sam liked to bat me around. He’d get drunk and it was like walking on eggshells. Anything could set him off, the baby crying, Sheila talking too loud. And I was always the target.”
    “He would hit you?”
    “Yes, he would hit me. He’d become a monster. It was one of the reasons I had to leave.”
    “But you left the kids with the monster,” Edgar said.
    This time she didn’t react as if struck. She fixed her pale eyes on Edgar with a deathly look that made Edgar turn his indignant eyes away. She spoke very calmly to him.
    “Who are you to judge anyone? I had to survive and I could not take them with me. If I had tried none of us would have survived.”
    “I’m sure they understood that,” Edgar said.
    The woman stood up again.
    “I don’t think I am going to talk to you anymore. I’m sure you can find your way out.”
    She headed