Bone Rattle, Marc Cameron [fun to read txt] 📗

I don’t pick up men. Ever. And still, there I was, next to a toothless guy who somehow convinced my drunk brain that I should party with him in his tent.”

She checked Cutter’s face. Still impassive. He was a better sin eater than he let on.

“Anyway, he smelled like old socks and stale urine, but then, so did I by this point. My wallet was on the ground beside him, the money gone. He must have passed out before he… you know. I just… I puked right there on the tent floor, then again outside. I think I left a trail all the way to the road.

“Anyway, I ran until my feet bled, wanting to put as much distance between myself and the situation. Then I caught a glimpse of a reflection in the window of a Subway sandwich shop, a barefoot Native woman with a snotty nose and matted hair. It hit me like a train. I was the situation. It didn’t matter how far I ran, I’d still be there. I tried to wash up in a coffee shop restroom, but the hipster barista ran me off in the middle of my spit bath.”

Maycomb sighed, giving Cutter a pitiful look, not because she wanted sympathy. She just couldn’t manage anything else. “So there I was, barefoot on the streets of Anchorage, with sopping wet hair and cry-swollen face. I fell down on my knees on the corner of Northern Lights and… I don’t know where…” She began to cry but kept talking. “My heart was not strong enough to tell my drunk brain to quit drinking. People talk all the time in AA about rock bottom. Well, that day was my rock bottom – not that I’d nearly let some drunk guy go to town on me in his tent, but that I’d totally forgotten about my husband and son, the most precious people in my life.

“I flagged down the first Anchorage cop that I saw and told him I was a drunk and wanted to get sober. He believed the first part, but was not so sure about the last. Six days in detox, another month of in-patient, and they gave me my old job back at the radio station in Juneau. You know, the worst part? The worst part is that my husband took care of our little boy the entire time without a word of argument or threat. He never filed any papers, no protective orders, nothing to tell the courts what a shitty mother I was. I have no idea why, but he took me back – and then he died. Suddenly. A headache. Dead.”

Maycomb slogged along in silence for several steps, then gave a halfhearted shrug. “It’s pretty easy to see why Rockie hates me.”

“You told your husband everything?” Cutter said at length.

“All of it. More than I told you.”

“And he took you back,” Cutter said. It wasn’t a question, but she answered it anyway.

“Yes.”

“Seems to me, that’s all that matters. Detective Van Dyke is going to think what she’s going to think. My granddad used to say that we can’t change someone else’s mind, we can only change ourselves and let things shake out like they shake out.”

“Sounds too simple.”

“The principle is simple,” Cutter said. “Following through with it’s hard as hell. I’m not big on pop psychology, but I will tell you this – everybody on earth’s got a secret sin. Something they know without a doubt is so much worse than everybody else’s sins. Most of the time, they’re not worse, they’re just different.”

“Have you got one?”

“Indeed I do,” Cutter said. “And I will spend the rest of my life making amends for it.”

“Will you—”

“Not a chance.”

Cutter played his headlamp across the gray rock face at the end of the tunnel. Maycomb had given up a lot, but he wasn’t the sort of guy to ask questions. If she wanted to say more, she was welcome to. Until then, he needed to reach Donita Willets.

Two rough-cut pieces of timber stuck a few inches above a dark void at the base of the wall. Cutter stood at the edge, toes against the ladder, looking down. The ladder was probably as old as the mine, well over a hundred years. Hand-hewn timbers formed the uprights, as well as the crosspieces. Water from the tunnel floor cascaded in a small but steady fall over the rungs, keeping them wet and, Cutter hoped, from wasting away to dry rot. In its day, the ladder had been hell for stout, capable of holding the weight of miners and heavy gear. But now…

Cutter put a boot to the top rung, pressed, but didn’t commit.

“It’s more hope and rust than it is wood,” he said. “But it seems to be holding.”

“For now,” Maycomb said, unconvinced, Eeyore-like.

Cutter peeked over the edge, exploring the bottom to see what sort of jagged rocks and mining tools he would impale himself on if the ladder disintegrated. The shaft appeared to widen into a larger room below. The water pouring over the edge turned the bottom ground to a muddy slurry. For all Cutter knew, it was a bottomless pit of gunk, but a splintered dynamite crate and a rusted coffee can beneath the hole made him believe it was no more than a few inches deep. He dropped a rock the size of his fist, watched it splat and then sink halfway into the ooze. The water had to be going somewhere.

Bracing himself on the uneven rock wall, he leaned forward to point his light farther back in the open room. He slipped on the slick floor, caught himself, and then began to turn his helmet back and forth, scanning the muddy cavern below.

Maycomb’s hand shot to her mouth when the beam illuminated something pale at the edge of the shadows. The shapes were too regular for rocks.

She gasped. “Are those bones?”

“Too big to be human,” Cutter said.

“Aliens then,” Maycomb groused.

“More likely a horse or a mule. Probably spent a