The Bone Bed

What a lovely place this is, I say.
    “I’m wondering if you know who Howard Roth is,” I begin. “He was local and lived just a few blocks from here. He did odd jobs, was a handyman off and on.”
    “Yes.” She opens a bottle of water and pours some in a coffee cup. “He was nice enough, with some problems, though, and I heard about what happened. That he fell down his stairs. Very sad; his life was tragic.” She looks at me as if to say she doesn’t understand.
    She can’t imagine why I’m here about him.
    I ask her about volunteers and if they might include a Cambridge woman named Peggy Stanton.
    “I don’t know what happened,” Mrs. Hoyt replies. “She just stopped coming. Why do you ask?”
    “Then you knew her?”
    She looks at me, baffled, and of course she has no reason to be aware that Peggy Stanton is dead.
    “Okay,” she says, and she’s starting to get upset. “Please don’t tell me . . .”
    For a moment she looks as if she might cry.
    “Well, what a lovely woman. You wouldn’t be here if it was nothing,” she says.
    “When was the last time you saw her?” I ask.
    “I don’t recall exactly.” She nervously types on her keyboard. “I can check. It’s easy enough to take a look at our volunteer schedule. We have such a wonderful group of people who make the lives of the residents so much better, people who bring joy and hope where there wouldn’t be any for so many of them. I’m sorry. I’m talking too much. I’m just a little flustered.”
    She asks me what happened, and I tell her Peggy Stanton is deceased. We plan to release the information to the media first thing in the morning, but a body has been positively identified as hers.
    “Good God, what a shame. Oh, Lord,” she says. “Dear God. How awful. Well, I thought it was the spring, and I’m right. This is terribly upsetting. When the residents know, they’ll be heartbroken. She was so popular, had been helping out here for many years.”
    The last time Peggy Stanton was here was the night she vanished, April twenty-seventh, a Friday, when she ate dinner with a group she was working with, a collage that night, the residential administrator explains.
    “It was a true passion with her,” she says. “Teaching arts and crafts, working with your hands. Peggy was just very involved in improving self-esteem, reducing anxiety and depression in seniors, and when you actually shape something with your bare hands and watch it evolve into a work of art? There just isn’t better therapy,” she adds, and she describes Peggy Stanton as a fine woman shattered by personal devastation, by unimaginable loss.
    “She had a healing touch, you might say. Maybe because of what she’d been through in her own life. She was just starting the residents on pottery,” she explains. “But then she didn’t come back.”
    She assumed Peggy Stanton had gone to Florida, perhaps to her lake cottage in the Chicago area.
    “I wasn’t concerned, just a bit disappointed, as we’d been investigating kilns,” she says, and I think of Peggy Stanton’s basement, of work recently done and of the unusual tools on the table down there.
    Not for baking but for pottery, and I ask her if Peggy Stanton might have been thinking about installing a kiln in the basement of her home and if she might have hired Howard Roth on occasion to do an odd job or two. Very possibly, she says, but she can’t be sure, and she offers to give me a tour of Fayth House.
    “I’ve held you up enough,” I reply, and I thank her as a chime sounds on my phone.
    A text message from Lucy.
    Who is Jasmine?
I read, as I’m leaving
.
    Mildred Lott’s missing dog that turned up later
, I text her back in the dark, returning to my SUV, which is next to another SUV that wasn’t parked there earlier.
    A silver Jeep Cherokee with a silver mesh grille right next to me when the whole damn parking lot is practically empty, and I get an eerie feeling, a sensation that flutters.
    Missing??? Then why’s she outside at night calling it?
    About to get in the car & will call,
I reply
.
    The silver Jeep Cherokee that passed me a little while ago when I first got here, it occurs to me. The same one I saw earlier in my own parking lot or one just like it. I point my key to unlock my SUV while part of me wants to run, and another text chimes.
    Jasmine! Jasmine! Where are you? Come!

thirty-nine
    I’VE BEEN TAKEN BY PIRATES.
    The boat I’m in has a metal hull with carpet. It is