The Bone Bed

Quincy. How about I call you Quincy?” he says to the puppy, and I hate it when I’m negative.
    It certainly can be argued that if I help stop a killer I’m saving a life, maybe more than one life, that what I do morning, noon, and night prevents more violence, and Al Galbraith wasn’t finished. Benton says he was just getting started, that his elderly mother, Mary Galbraith, who has been a resident at Fayth House for years, suffered a stroke about ten months ago and has never recovered cognitive functions. That seems to have been the trigger, as much as it is possible to explain what can’t be explained.
    The youngest child of a philanthropic Pennsylvania family that dabbles in farms and horses and wineries, a graduate of Yale, never married, and he hated his mother that much. She was a scholar, a member of the Society of Civil War Historians, and a consulting archivist for the Girl Scouts, and he couldn’t kill her enough.
    “What kind of wine?” Lucy walks in with several bottles.
    Janet already has helped herself to a glass, and I wipe my hands on my apron and inspect labels.
    “Nope.” I return to the dough I’m working, flouring it, pressing it, gently stretching it into a circle. “Those pinots from Oregon.” I move the dough, using my knuckles so I don’t poke holes in it. “That lovely case you gave me for my birthday, the Domaine Drouhin down in the basement.”
    Janet says she’ll get it, and I move my knuckles apart and rotate the dough, stretching it for the first pizza, this one mushrooms, extra sauce, extra cheese, extra onion, double smoked bacon, and pickled jalapeños. Marino’s pizza. I ask Lucy to get the fresh grated Parmigiano-Reggiano and whole-milk mozzarella out of refrigerator two, and I suggest Marino take both dogs out in the backyard.
    “You see?” I say to Lucy when he’s gone. “I have to ask him. This is what worries me. It should occur to him on his own that it’s time to take his puppy out.”
    “It’s going to be fine, Aunt Kay. He loves that dog.”
    “Loving something’s not enough. You have to take care of it.” I start on the next pizza crust.
    “Maybe that’s what he’s finally going to learn. How to take care of something and how to take care of himself; maybe it’s time he does.” Lucy sets bowls of cheese on the counter. “Maybe he needs a reason to go to the trouble. Maybe you have to want something so badly that you’re finally willing to be less selfish.”
    “I’m glad you feel that way.” I toss the crust and place it in an oiled, floured pan, and I know Lucy is talking about herself and what’s going on in her life. “I just don’t understand why you felt you couldn’t tell me. Maybe you could get the onions and mushrooms out of refrigerator one; we’re going to need to sauté them and drain them. To get all the water out.”
    “I was afraid to jinx it,” she says. “I needed to see if it could work, and most times it doesn’t work if you try to go back to someone you used to be with.” She finds a cutting board and a knife. “I know you feel you should be told absolutely everything, but I have to be alone in my life, to feel what I feel by myself sometimes.”
    “I certainly don’t feel I should be told everything.” I place a third crust in a pan. “If I really felt that way, I wouldn’t have much of a marriage.”
    I haven’t seen Benton since yesterday, when he was with me at my office. I took care of Douglas Burke because I didn’t think anyone else should, and Benton didn’t look on directly, but he was in the autopsy room the entire time. Mainly he wanted to know if she struggled, if she made any attempt at all to defend herself. Burke was armed with a nine-millimeter pistol, and Benton didn’t understand what could have happened, why she didn’t fight.
    All she did was shoot the damn door and shoot it badly,
he said repeatedly.
    Based on the dents and holes in the door and door frame, she was aiming for the lock.
    Why the hell didn’t she shoot him?
Benton must have asked that a dozen times, and I’ve continued to explain what seems obvious to everyone else.
    Burke was so hung up on Channing Lott, she was so convicted in her own beliefs, that she didn’t know who stood before her. She didn’t realize who the killer was until he led her into that windowless room, what Al Galbraith had turned into a death chamber, an empty storage area with walk-in deadbolted freezers and a port in a brick wall fixed