The Bone Bed

inexpensive, and Millie was beside herself. There aren’t words to describe how upset she was.” Channing Lott blinks back tears.
    “Your dog vanished three days before your wife did,” I say to him.
    “Yes.” He clears his throat.
    “Did Jasmine ever show up?”
    “Two days after Millie disappeared, Jasmine was found wandering several miles north of our house, close to the Annisquam River,” he says, and I think of Peggy Stanton’s cat. “In an off-leash walking area with a lot of brush and boulders above Wheeler Street. Some people out with their dog found her.”
    “Do you think she’d been loose the entire time she was missing?” I ask.
    “Couldn’t have been, not for the better part of a week in the rainy raw weather, down in the low forties at night, without food or water. She was in too good of shape to have been out that entire time. I think whoever took her changed his mind. Jasmine can be aggressive, unpredictable, isn’t fond of strangers.”
    Someone who has no regard for human life but wouldn’t harm an animal.
    “The Ransom of Red Chief.” Channing Lott’s laughter is hollow, and what is significant to me is the chronology.
    Most likely Peggy Stanton’s cat got out or was put out after her owner had disappeared and possibly already was dead, yet Mildred Lott’s dog vanished before any crime had occurred.
    “It’s been suggested that my wife might have drowned accidentally.” He gets around to asking my opinion about that, and I can’t possibly have an answer. “Or maybe took her own life.”
    He goes on to describe the theories, which have been endless and far-fetched, some of them recited by Donoghue in court. Mildred Lott was drunk or on drugs and wandered outside and fell into the ocean or deliberately went into the frigid water to drown herself. She was having an affair and ran off with whoever it was because she feared her husband’s wrath. She’d been stashing millions of dollars in offshore accounts and is now living under an assumed identity in the Caribbean, on the Mediterranean, in the South of France, in Marrakech. Alleged sightings of her have been all over the Internet.
    “I’m interested in your opinion.” He presses me for one. “A person drowns either accidentally or is murdered or commits suicide? Wouldn’t the body turn up eventually?”
    “Bodies in water aren’t always found,” I reply. “People lost at sea, people who go overboard from ships or get pulled under or swept away by strong currents, for example. Depending on whether the body gets hung up on something—”
    “Eventually there would be absolutely nothing left?”
    “Whatever is left has to be found, and it isn’t always.”
    “But if my wife fell into the ocean, perhaps stumbled over rocks or fell off our dock, wouldn’t you expect her to show up?” He persists bravely and not easily.
    His eyes are bright with sorrow that seems real.
    “In a case like that, generally, yes,” I answer.
    “Al, if you would?” Lott says, without looking at him.
    Al Galbraith opens his briefcase and withdraws a manila envelope he pushes across the table to me, and I don’t open it. I don’t touch it. I won’t until I know exactly what it is and whether it is something I should see.
    “A copy of the security camera recording,” Lott explains. “The same thing the Gloucester detectives, the FBI, the lawyers have. What the jury saw. Twenty-six seconds. Not much but it’s the last images of her, the last thing Millie did before she vanished in thin air. She’s opening a back door of our house at exactly thirteen minutes before midnight on that Sunday, March eleventh. She’s dressed for bed, and there’s no damn reason for her to go out into the backyard at that hour. Certainly she wasn’t letting Jasmine out. Jasmine was still missing. It was cold, quite overcast and windy, and Millie walked out of the house not at all dressed for the weather and seemed to be a bit panicked.”
    At this point, he turns to look at his colleagues.
    “It’s still not the right choice of words. A word I’ve struggled with, trying to precisely describe the look on her face, her body language.” He seems sincerely at a loss and genuinely pained. “How would you describe it?” he asks his chief executives. “Urgent, distressed, alarmed?”
    “I don’t get that when I watch it,” Galbraith says, as if he’s said it before.
    It sounds flat. It sounds rehearsed.
    “Only that she appears to have a