The Bone Collector

looked down at his handiwork. Then out the window again.
    His hands, in their circular motion, precise. The tiny scrap of sandpaper whispering, shhhhh, shhhhh  . . . Like a mother hushing her child.
    A decade ago, the days of promise in New York, some crazy artist had moved in here. He’d filled the dank, two-story place with broken and rusting antiques. Wrought-iron grilles, hunks of crown molding and framed squares of spidered stained glass, scabby columns. Some of the artist’s work remained on the walls. Frescoes on the old plaster: murals, never completed, of workers, children, angst-ridden lovers. Round, emotionless faces—the man’s motif—stared blankly, as if the souls had been nipped out of their smooth bodies.
    The painter was never very successful, even after the most ironclad of marketing ideas—his own suicide—and the bank foreclosed on the building several years ago.
    Shhhhh . . . .
    The bone collector had stumbled across the place last year and he’d known immediately that this was home. The desolation of the neighborhood was certainly important to him—it was obviously practical. But there was another appeal, more personal: the lot across the street. During some excavation several years ago a backhoe had unearthed a load of human bones. It turned out this had been one of the city’s old cemeteries. Newspaper articles about it suggested the graves might contain the remains not only of Federal and Colonial New Yorkers but Manate and Lenape Indians as well.
    He now set aside what he’d been smoothing with the emery paper—a carpal, the delicate palm bone—and picked up the wrist, which he’d carefully detached from the radius and ulna last night just before leaving for Kennedy Airport to collect the first victims. It had been drying for over a week and most of the flesh was gone but it still took some effort to separate the elaborate cluster of bones. They snapped apart with faint plops, like fish breaking the surface of a lake.
    Oh, the constables, they were a lot better than he’d anticipated. He’d been watching them search along Pearl Street, wondering if they’d ever figure out where he’d left the woman from the airport. Astonished when they suddenly ran toward the right building. He’d guessed it would take two or three victims until they got a feel for the clues. They hadn’t saved her of course. But they might have. A minute or two earlier would have made all the difference.
    As with so much in life.
    The navicular, the lunate, the hamate, the capitate . . . the bones, intertwined like a Greek puzzle ring, came apart under his strong fingers. He picked bits of flesh and tendon off them. He selected the greater multangulum—at the base of where the thumb had once been—and began to sand once more.
    Shhhhh, shhhhhhh.
    The bone collector squinted as he looked outside and imagined he saw a man standing beside one of the old graves. It must have been his imagination because the man wore a bowler hat and was dressed in mustard-colored gabardine. He rested some dark roses beside the tombstone and then turned away from it, dodging the horses and carriages on his way to the elegantly arched bridge over the Collect Pond outlet at Canal Street. Who’d he been visiting? Parents? A brother? Family who’d died of consumption or in one of the terrible influenza epidemics that’d been ravaging the city recently—
    Recently?
    No, not recently of course. A hundred years ago— that’s what he meant.
    He squinted and looked again. No sign of the carriages or the horses. Or the man with the bowler hat. Though they’d seemed as real as flesh and blood.
    However real they are.
    Shhhhh, shhhhhh.
    It was intruding again, the past. He was seeing things that’d happened before, that had happened then, as if they were now. He could control it. He knew he could.
    But as he gazed out the window he realized that of course there was no before or after. Not for him. He drifted back and forth through time, a day, five years, a hundred years or two, like a dried leaf on a windy day.
    He looked at his watch. It was time to leave.
    Setting the bone on the mantel, he washed his hands carefully—like a surgeon. Then for five minutes he ran a pet-hair roller over his clothes to pick up any bone dust or dirt or body hairs that might lead the constables to him.
    He walked into the carriage house past the half-finished painting of a moon-faced butcher in a bloody white apron. The bone collector